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List:       wikien-l
Subject:    Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: The "months later" effect
From:       Elisabeth Bauer <elian () djini ! de>
Date:       2004-10-10 19:09:12
Message-ID: 416988D8.4050203 () djini ! de
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Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

[many true things]

> But when an article is of high quality, the people who have knowledge in 
> the topic area are likely to leave it alone. The people who are most 
> likely to edit it are people who want to push a point of view, or people 
> who know much less than they think they know. The result is that the 
> better an article is, the greater the chances that random edits will 
> lower its quality.

I completely agree with this view. We are loosing too many good authors 
due to these problems. Bored with reverting the same propaganda and POV 
again and again, having to repeat discussions every two months when the 
next guy arrives who insists on bringing up an already solved point. 
It's not only Adam Carr, there are many others who silently leave wikipedia.

> I think there needs to be some mechanism in place so that when an 
> article becomes generally regarded as good, Version 1.0 or whatever, it 
> can be sort of locked in place. Perhaps it could be stamped with a 
> version number, and any attempts to edit [[GoodArticle]] are 
> automatically redirected to [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]]. Within a 
> discussion forum, when and only when there is general consensus that 
> [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]] is better than [[GoodArticle]], a sysop or 
> suitably-authorized-panjandrum can move it to [[GoodArticle]].

We'll need mechanisms - what kind I don't know yet.
For the moment I placed two feature requests on bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674

I want to encourage everyone to vote for and leave comments on these 
requests.

That's the technical part. The other thing I want to propose is a 
change to our NPOV policy.

At the moment it says: "articles should have a neutral point of view."
This dates back to the time where people had confidence that in the wiki 
process, in the struggle between adherents of different views after some 
time a good NPOV version finally emerges. I don't believe in this (I 
never did, actually). Yes, sometimes it happens, but only if 
non-involved people put a lot of effort in establishing compromises, 
moderating the conflicts and so on.

NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."

Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your personal 
views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who openly work 
for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to edit that article 
at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my propaganda into an article 
and let others do the tedious taks of neutralizing it", it's "do your 
best to write from a neutral point of view. And if you are unable to do 
so, leave the article alone". And this policy should be enforced by the 
community.

greetings and sorry for the terrible english,
elian
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