[WikiEN-l] Destructionism

[stevertigo]

Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> That seems to be a description of entropy.

It is. I had thought destruction was the salient concept here, in
keeping with our old tradition of creating "-isms" (deletionism, (did
I coin that?) inclusionism, etc.)

> 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.

I just did this at [[matter]], but the issue though is that there's no
way to really see what gold exists in previous versions, unless you
know what already exists there and understand what erosion has taken
place.  Matter is an example of a case where 1) everyone knows the
common definition and 2) the technical definitions can sometimes
contradict, hence 3) rewrites to include these advanced caveats turn
the article into WP:NONCE.

> But note that entropy is unavoidable on an encyclopedia even if an
> article is "complete". [..] the quality of the article, judged according to
> that knowledge, degrades if it is not updated.

+

-SC