Re: State of the Wikipedia

In article <ac7b731vnnuc53hjq7j3oehh7m59nubkkk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 20:31:27 +0000 (UTC), wollman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(Garrett Wollman) wrote:

In article <dh5b7395jcrgd5g7mhtamdt63bhndeb5rg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe@xxxxxxx> wrote:
If an accurate entry is deleted or modified, it is not the original
poster's responsibility to restore it. If Wikipedia's staff doesn't
have some way of fixing it [...]

What staff?

All those volunteers who are currently deleting valid entries.

As opposed to all those volunteers (far outnumbering the volunteer
administrators who can delete pages) who are currently creating or
improving good articles?

I must admit to not having seen this. Of the 200-odd articles on my
watchlist, only one (which I had written just a few minutes before)
was ever proposed for deletion (as a result of a misunderstanding on
the part of the nominator), and I was able to quickly clear that up
with minor rewording of the lead. I was annoyed, but not nearly as
bothered as I am by some editors who go around replacing good writing
with bad (that generally says almost but not quite the same thing).
There are a number of articles that I don't bother to watch any more
because someone decided to infect them with sectionitis and would not
be gainsaid.

(Oops, I take that back. There was another article which was proposed
for deletion, twice in fact: the one on James Nicoll, which I did not
write but have edited.)

While I was laid up with a broken knee last winter, I spent a lot of
time on deletion patrol for Wikiquote, finding pages for the sayings
of unnotable high-school students, unremarkable private figures,
self-published books by unknown authors, and so on, and nominating
them for deletion. This actually did make a difference; only once or
twice did my nomination a page for deletion actually attract a
response from someone who cared about that page, and in most of those
situations, the page was ultimately kept once a motivated editor was
found to improve it. Wikiquote of course has the luxury of a much
smaller community of editors, and hasn't suffered from quite the level
of guideline rigidity that the much larger and more visible Wikipedia
has. Some of the deleted pages were indeed legitimate by WQ
standards, but were either too specific or lacked something fairly
fundamental to WQ's function: verifiable quotations.

For both sites, however, the fundamental policy remains: subjects must
be notable, and unsourced statements (or quotations) may be removed at
any time. These are fundamental, non-negotiable policies of the
people who pay for it all, the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation
has a particular, legally-established purpose, and that purpose does
not involve promoting Joe Blow's self-published crackpot theory of
gravity, or what the seventh-graders in Mrs. Doe's English class in
Tucson have to say about each other. Ultimately, it is their
responsibility to make a value judgment about the worth of every
subject covered in every project they sponsor (of which there are more
than a hundred now). They seem to feel that the present system is
working.

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are
wollman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx| nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry
Opinions not those | grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape
of MIT or CSAIL. | our history. - S.J. Gould, Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness
.

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