[WikiEN-l] Destructionism

[William Beutler]

Certainly, it still describes a real phenomenon: articles that attain
Featured or Good status, and then have those statuses (statii?) revoked as
they degrade. It happens, all right.

As a concept, it bears thinking about. I'm not necessarily saying there
should be a hold placed on articles that have attained those statuses... OK,
maybe I am. Limit editing to autoconfirmed editors? Obviously when FAs reach
the front page, unhelpful editing pretty much always follows. I don't see it
as a terrible thing that editing be slowed down on those articles, for
instance. It took a lot of considered work to get there. Maybe it should
take some consideration to change them.



On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 8:40 PM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:

> David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > People come to Wikipedia for its breadth of coverage, not its
> > polished writing.
> > Indeed, some articles decay into mush. I didn't say polishing was easy
> > - it isn't, which is why the people who do it get so resentful.
>
> I do work hard at polishing ledes, and Im not unhappy when something
> Ive written stands the test of time. But there are times when it seems
> that open editing model itself was nothing more a bad idea. I guess
> this idea reflects a bit of that pessimism. :-)
>
> The 'decay into mush' point is well made. Its difficult sometimes for
> one to justify to oneself the effort required to overcome mush-ism -
> particularly when its an adversarial system (WP:BRD). Its the
> adversarial systems which seem to be paradoxically constructive and
> destructive at the same time.
>
> -SC
>
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