[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 3:59 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> I re-copy edited it. It was rescued in a rush, and improved in a rush.
> The next step is to collate with the original article., and then to
> look for good additional material.

Thanks.

> Some of the above discussions imply much too high a standard, both for
> what should be in Wikipedia and for what the quality of the content in
> Wikipedia should be. We are not producing a definitive scholarly
> resource, nor are our basic methods adapted to doing so--scholarship
> requires critical evaluation and editorial control, two things we are
> unable to provide.

Good points. There should still be a quality control endpoint, though.
Clearly not "featured article" in cases where the information is
minimal or incomplete, but still some definite minimum standard (I
would say the MilHist B-class criteria would be a good minimum
standard).

> What we can provide is a rough-and-ready general
> reference work, and our strength is the potential for of a large group
> of amateurs to be extremely comprehensive  , and include a wider range
> of material than any conventional method of work has ever provided.

Indeed. But the question is whether the *process* of producing that
will end up with a distorted view of someone's life and career. Kind
of like WP:UNDUE. When these mini-bios are produced for websites or
conferences, they deliberately don't try and cover everything, but
Wikipedians, when aggregating disparate sources, can go too far.
Judgment in editing is still needed.

> It can neither make true judgments of importance, nor will it  be
> guaranteed accurate--those who want to read such have the full range
> of conventional sources at their disposal, and another goal of the
> free scholarship movement --different from ours-- is to make these
> more widely available. Those who want to  write a this level need to
> write in the more conventional way, a way that requires qualified
> researchers with access to the full range of relevant sources, and
> trained editors with professional standards.

WP articles will only ever be a starting point, never an endpoint,
that's the way I describe it to myself. In some ways, Wikipedia
articles try and be the best online resource there is for a topic, but
that is all it is, at the end of the day: a *resource*, a starting
point to go on and read more about the topic.

Many FAs I've looked at are nowhere near comprehensive. It is easy to
find stuff that has been left out, either through ignorance, or
something being considered trivial. I used to worry about that, but
now I tell myself that the WP article is only a starting point, a
usually rather comprehensive overview, but in no way the final word on
anything.

> The goal for BLPs --or any other topic--cannot be the complete
> avoidance of error, for not even the most professional of resources
> have the ability to do that. Not even the most carefully edited
> publications have succeeded in being free from hoaxes and libel. The
> goal is to be as reasonably correct as possible, to remove obvious
> error when pointed out to us, and have working policies that will
> exclude the worst blunders and discourage the use for libel,
> propaganda, and promotion.  The only way to avoid these entirely is to
> include nothing at all about anything involving anyone living or any
> living writer-- some of our worst BLP problems involve our comments on
> living authors.

But do you think that something like as "approved article" status for
BLPs might help?

> The easiest thing is to write nothing. The second easiest to is
> eliminate material without thinking. The third easiest, is a little
> different, for it  is to write without thinking. We  can not exclude
> the thoughtless from working here, either to make foolish positive
> contributions or foolish negative edits, and only the most reckless of
> all or the most obviously biased can actually be rejected.

But about the timescale? What should be done with *any* backlog when
it builds up beyond the resources of the volunteer workforce to deal
with or to maintain existing articles?

Carcharoth