[WikiEN-l] Destructionism

[James Alexander]

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 7 August 2010 01:45, William Beutler <williambeutler at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Does it happen very often? Most revocations are due to us raising the
> standards we require rather than due to articles deteriorating. If an
> article has deteriorated to the point where it isn't worthy of FA any
> more then wouldn't it be better just revert to the last FA worthy
> version? If the FA criteria are such that there are edits that we
> don't want to revert but that make an article no longer worthy of FA,
> then we need to change the FA criteria (since they don't fit with our
> actual views on what makes an article better or worse).
>
>
>
I think part of this is what David was saying about adding new content.
Being an FA is a lot more then just content and adding "not perfect/good
enough" prose that adds important and encyclopedic information  shouldn't be
reverted just because it "isn't good enough to be on an FA". Obviously the
preference would be to try and rewrite that new info to be good enough for
an FA.


James Alexander
james.alexander at rochester.edu
jamesofur at gmail.com