[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?

[Ray Saintonge]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> Spot on. Now, comes a writer and creates that thing of beauty, and it 
> is concise and precise and all that. Took hours to boil it down to 
> that. Oh, the writer didn't source it. The writer knew the subject 
> very well and simply wrote about what the writer knows. And, the 
> writer knows, anyone else who knows this subject will recognize the 
> accuracy of this. I'm not talking about someone simply asserting their own POV.
>
> Used to be, this article might sit there, unsourced for years. 
> Nowadays, five minutes, speedy deletion tag. "Fails to assert 
> notability." "No sources."
>
> The ladder that built the project is being chopped away. There is 
> possibly help coming: flagged revisions. Once we have a means of 
> discriminating between checked and sourced and polished articles and 
> those which are perhaps better called "submissions," we might be able 
> to move beyond the whole deletionist/inclusionist madness. We might 
> be able to stop stepping on the seeds that could be fostered and 
> nourished with good editing. If we don't, somebody else will. 
Well put. The often cancerous obsession that some have for notability 
and sourcing is as damaging to the future of Wikipedia as the sins that 
they are trying to suppress.  Admittedly biographies of living persons 
require stricter guidelines, but they are an exception.  If an article 
in most subject areas is started without sources, or an assertion of 
notability it's not a big deal.  Somebody will add them eventually.

Ec