[WikiEN-l] Destructionism

[Tony Sidaway]

On 14 August 2010 05:37, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.

I've had to investigate articles in the past and there are some
effective time-saving methods such as: looking at the editing as
composed of different waves, characterized by the identity of the
major editors; performing diffs at timely intervals (three or six
months, say) to identify large scale changes.  You might miss a
shortlived improvement of course, but you still pick up on any
significant trends in degradation.