[WikiEN-l] In defence of the minor edit

[The Cunctator]

Yes, trying to force people to do big edits is a bad idea.

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:19 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers at googlemail.com> wrote:

> I'm afraid I have to disagree with David Goodman's final paragraph
> calling for an end to minor improvements to articles. I have done many
> thousands of such minor edits in my time, tasks such as going through
> all the articles with the word preformed and changing almost all to
> performed. That has resulted in my making minor improvements to many
> articles which I care nothing about and don't read more than the
> paragraph or sentence that I fix, other times I find an article
> interesting, read the whole thing and perhaps come across something
> else I can correct. I believe that on the whole what I do is useful,
> and I enjoy doing it. If I was paid to systematically go through
> wikipedia articles checking each whole article completely and fixing
> the errors I find, I am pretty sure the total improvement to Wikipedia
> I would make would be less per hour than my contributions as a
> volunteer, and of course there is the little matter of cost. Enabling
> volunteers to improve the bits of Wikipedia that they volunteer to do
> is much more cost effective than employing people and telling them
> what to work on.
>
> WereSpielChequers
>
> > The change that would make the biggest difference is that each person
> > who looks at an article for any reason , such as fixing typos or
> > adding categories or disam links, actually try to spot any serious
> > problems, not just do the routine task they came for. There are too
> > many BLPs that have been looked at twenty times, but none of them
> > carefully.
> >
> > David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
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