[WikiEN-l] Destructionism

[Tony Sidaway]

On 7 August 2010 01:25, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Destructionism: The tendency for Wikipedia articles which have reached
> an advanced degree of completeness and encyclopedic value to be edited
> in increasingly destructive ways, simply because perfection has
> already been achieved or nearly achieved, yet articles remain open to
> editing.

That seems to be a description of entropy. Of course the older
revisions remain in the history and anybody is free to extract a
snapshot that he considers to be superior to the present one.
Citizendium has done that and continued to work on articles in a more
restricted environment.  One or two other projects have done something
similar.  At least one, which I worked on briefly, was intended to
produce finished products rather than ongoing works.

But note that entropy is unavoidable on an encyclopedia even if an
article is "complete".  In time the knowledge on the subject of the
article changes and the quality of the article, judged according to
that knowledge, degrades if it is not updated.  For instance, articles
about the early interplanetary probes Voyager 1 and 2 written in 2002
would not properly reflect the knowledge on the same subjects
available to the writer in 2010.

Is there any subject on which the definitive article has been written?
 In the short term, undoubtedly, but in the long term (and it's
becoming obvious that the content of Wikipedia is for the long term)
there is no subject on which we will not advance our knowledge to the
point at which a significant revision of the relevant Wikipedi article
would be merited.