[WikiEN-l] Destructionism

[MuZemike]

On 8/6/2010 9:13 PM, William Beutler wrote:
> I'm not completely sure where SC was going with his observation about
> "Destructionism" -- I took it as a clever play on "Deletionism" and all the
> other -isms, to point out a phenomenon he's noticed on at least En-WP, which
> I recognized immediately.
>    

I think we're comparing apples with oranges here. From how I see it, 
"destructionism" identifies the nature of articles themselves over time 
while "deletionism" (as well as the other established "-isms") 
identifies the nature of editors' behaviors and mainspace philosophies.

That being said, some other comments:

I do believe that the quality of articles do deteriorate over time, 
especially when not watched or updated. That is the inevitable nature of 
an open editing environment. This may be due to several reasons; this 
could be that the article doesn't have many watchers or that the main 
contributor(s) is/are no longer watching the article or no longer cares. 
This allows editors who do not know nor likely care to chip away at the 
article's quality and accuracy to a point where it either becomes 
apparent a cleanup effort is needed or that a GA reassessment or FA 
review is needed.

Also, standards for promoting articles to GA or FA were lower than they 
are now, mostly due to the overall quality of Wikipedia articles 
steadily increasing. I opine that most articles that were promoted to FA 
in 2006 or earlier would not meet today's more stringent FA standards.

Case in point, I just finished with an FA review of "Nintendo 
Entertainment System" 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System) which ended 
up being delisted from FA status. It was promoted back in January 2005. 
I think both of my last two paragraphs come into play as, while a very 
popular article with over 200 people watchlisting it, nobody took any 
efforts to cleanup or maintain the article those 5 1/2 years it was an 
FA, and you get a lot of users who do not know better as far as 
verifiability is concerned who add whatever they want with nobody 
checking or challenging it. On the other hand, when I combed through the 
article in detail, I was surprised to see how poor the quality of the 
article was, that this would not pass for GA let alone FA today.

This brings us back to one of the original "standing orders" of 
Wikipedia way back in its early years 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Historical_archive/Rules_to_consider) 
of "Always leave something undone". Personally, I reject such principle 
as I believe users should contribute as much as they possibly can to an 
article. If others can contribute something different, great; if not, we 
have over 3.5 million other articles that need work or similar 
attention. There is more than enough work to go around for everyone. 
(The problem is IMO is that the vast majority of them hover around and 
devote all their time and energy to only a select few articles like 
Obama or heaven forbid Pikachu, for instance.)

-MuZemike