[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia dying?

[Ken Arromdee]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, Surreptitiousness wrote:
>> But since the complaint isn't just "Wikipedia has one error", fixing the error
>> doesn't actually resolve the complaint.  it only resolves the most visible
>> sign of the complaint, without resolving the underlying problem that's
>> really what's being complained about.
> I had thought the argument had moved on and I was responding to a point
> you had made, but if you want to drag it back to the initial subject,
> I'll just trot out the old maxim about how Rome wasn't built in a day.
> You can't build a brick wall in one go, you start with one brick and a
> bit of muck. Unless you're worried about footings, of course... So, how
> do you fix the underlying problems?  You roll your sleeves up and fix
> them.  Sofixit.

If the problem is that you have a leak which is causing the floorboards to rot,
you cannot solve the problem just by replacing a floorboard.  In fact, you
can't solve the problem by getting a lot of people together and replacing a
lot of flooorboards.

Telling someone to just fix it tells them to fix the symptoms of a problem.
It rarely fixes the actual problem.  And hoping that many people, all fixing
one mistake each, will fix the problem together isn't going to work; the
problem is not just that we have a lot of mistakes, it's that the mistakes
have an underlying cause.  Fixing the mistakes doesn't fix the underlying
cause.

And the complainer can't fix the underlying cause.  That's for us to do, and
we need to listen when someone complains, not tell him to just fix it.