User talk:Matt Britt/Don't just do whatever

Re: "May I Quote You"
Of course you can. What do I fall under... what not to write? ;) Thank you for asking permission first, even though I'm sure I never would have found out anyway. Dan 21:47, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Well done!
Good essay; excellent points of contention throughout. Minfo 02:17, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Re: Essay
(The following is copied from User talk:Matt Britt)

I read the essay, it is certainly true that a few experts in a field can contribute a great deal to an article. However, I am concerned by sample bias in just using FAs. Major re-drafting is usually part of the qualification process. For example in Enzyme, about 200 edits were necessary in response to reviewer comments, so the person or small group who nominates and follows the nomination comments is going to dominate the recent edit history.

A different point to make is when sharply divergent views are involved, this can produce an article which is a mass of constantly-contested detail of no real use to the casual reader. This can be avoided, again if a few expert editors can co-operate and produce a consensus. Homeopathy is an example of this I have worked on and my interactions with editors such as Peter morrell have shown me that this Wiki system can work well if people with expertise are willing to work together.

A provocative essay in all, needs a wider readership. TimVickers 21:13, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes
This is an excellent essay, and succeeds in articulating what I've been thinking about for some time with regard to Aaronsw's thought provoking Who Writes Wikipedia findings. Wikipedia content as a whole is written by a massive distributed group, but good Wikipedia content is written by a much smaller core--a core that includes all too few of our regular editors. Given that quality, not quantity, is our current focus, we should be thinking hard about what we can do to increase the proportion of regular editors who contribute this sort of material. If you don't mind, I may bring this up in a few places to call attention to it. --RobthTalk 19:02, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Some Random Thoughts...
If I've followed your argument correctly, you think Wikipedia would be improved by increasing participation in programs like AiD. But isn't it possible that even official encouragement would fail?

The vast majority of Wikipedians don't have the skill to write a featured article. Furthermore, those that do are already working on articles that interest them; while WikiPrograms organizes these people, I think that intelligent Wikipedians interested in similar topics would come together naturally. While offically encouraging article improvement might further interest those people capable of putting together a featured article, it would only increase the speed of the production of FA-quality articles by a small amount.

I think the truth of the matter is that there simply aren't enough people capable of writing really great articles. Encyclopedias produced commercially have a huge advantage, as they pay capable writers and fact-checkers, and aren't encumbered by a panoply of angry internet users out for their POV. Wikipedia is at a huge disadvantage here. The idea that FA-status articles are produced by one or two people is quite natural. The saying "too many cooks spoil the broth" applies well here - one or two knowledgable people produce excellent articles, while collabrative efforts like AiD do not.

In any case, I think this problem isn't much of one. While many articles aren't written with ideal precision or style, they provide useful information. More importantly, articles link to outside information. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are never better than summaries. Wikipedia, in fact, is already better than printed encyclopedias. The cross-referenced information is provided for immediate further research. And while the "Do Whatever" approach to article creation rarely results in great articles, it often results in pretty good ones.

I guess what my meandering thoughts really come down to is that I don't see a problem. The idyllic "real encyclopedia"-quality Wikipedia is impossible, and any changes won't result in that ideal being reached. Featured articles are really only stylistically better than the majority of other articles.

Given all of that, what you've said is all true. I hope I've been thought-provoking, or at least amusing. Your thoughts are extremely valid, and I hope more people read it. I agree with you; I'm just not sure that it's so much of a problem that it hurts Wikipedia.

In any case, have a nice day. Archaeo 15:04, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Random observation
Isn't this situation of mediocrity being the steady state for Wikipedia articles just like Free software in general? As the truism goes, most Free software was written to scratch an itch of the author - of the 16000 or whatever programs that make it all the way to being packaged (ex. by Debian), how many of them can be said to have been polished to the software equivalent of an FA? Not all that many - a few thousand at best. And software has commonly been observed to be a process much more conducive because of its greater "objective" nature, I guess. (I know I've seen this criticism of Wikipedia in at leas the Register.) So we really shouldn't be surprised - articles are written to satisfy an editor's itch, not to create the definitive and final encyclopedic article on the subject. Remember, worse is better. --Gwern (contribs) 05:46 9 January 2007 (GMT)

It is all about information
Wikipedia is not for me and probably not for any common person to have all articles be of FA quality. It is about the information that is offered to the reader. I have begun to use Wikipedia rather than Google for many of my needs for information on various topics. A mediocre article is enough for a reader to satisfy his needs on the topic.

I can sense a bitterness in your words. I don't think you should be bitter or feel detest about the wikiprocess not creating articles of FA quality. The amount of information is what really matters for the popularity of Wikipedia and the possibility to add information makes Wikipedia what Wikipedia is. Featured Articles may be a good but are by no means the pride of Wikipedia. It fulfils the pride of some Wikipedians but for the rest of us, it is nothing special. Lord Metroid 22:41, 5 February 2007 (UTC)


 * A valid point, and the amount of stock one places in the FA process is entirely up to one's own point of view. Personally, I don't think it's worth beans these days, but I don't think that means that we shouldn't have a more systematic method of producing top-quality articles on high relevance topics.  That's essentially the point of all of this; I don't see how Wikipedia is more useful than Google without some method for producing quality articles.  Otherwise we're just relying on chaos and might as well put our stock in search engines.  Thanks for your comments. -- mattb

In defense of individual editing
I agree that an article generally progresses from a B-class article to an FA because of the efforts of at most a few people. But I'm not sure that these steps are necessarily where most of the content creation takes place. In my experience with articles I have tried to significantly improve, I spend most of my time investigating, sourcing, and formatting others' content additions. Aaron's research suggests that lots of content comes from "outsiders", and is then modified and formatted by "insiders". This seems like an efficient process to me — similar, as Aaron says, to a traditional encyclopedia. And, using FA status as a measure of article quality, it seems to be working: as Featured article statistics shows, our FA count is increasing roughly linearly (though it is also true that creation of articles is progressing faster than FA-ing, since FAs are decreasing as a proportion of total articles).

Also keep in mind that all of us edit for free because we enjoy it. At least for me, editing would be boring if I wasn't interested in the article. Though I agree with encouraging article editing, I suggest, as an alternative to your idea of group work on articles through expanded article improvement drives, encouraging more individual work on important articles. One way to do so would be to work towards having Template:Maintained on the talk page of every core article. If ownership concerns were dealt with correctly, I think the quality of core articles would benefit from having a maintainer to keep the quality of each article up.  Λυδ α cιτγ  02:13, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

banned for agressive editing trying to bring science in
I once was a Wikipedia editor, but eventually was banned from science related articles for no stated reason or hearing or anything. I was an involved party to an arbitration hearing and someone proposed my ban and four signed on. Done. I requested two appeals and both have been competely ignored. I am grateful for that, for now I am authoring an article for CZ, totally at peace. Wikipedians are like frogs in a pan of water above a fire. Like everywhere else, some humans are criminals. Criminal activity (defined here as activity wich will destroy the organization) in Wikipedia takes place without any oversight. Or as one of them put it when I confronted the system: "A good Wikipedian can do as he well damn pleases." My point is that not all of them are "good." So I can see a cancer growing which if unchecked will destroy Wikipedia. I haven't researched this but if one were to go to a cntroversial subject in wikipedia, it will be, I submit, clear which side is favored. I call it the wikislant. tom mandel

Is this perhaps a temporary trend?
Like you, I've been puzzled and troubled by these issues (and sometimes guilty of them too!). However, something that continues to pre-occupy my mind foremost regarding the project is the breadth vs. depth dilemma. My wiki-philosophy probably is closest to Essentialism, which I think that you are at least partly aligned with.

But in regards to this dilemma - when we were growing for the first few years, there was a tremendous need to have something - anything! - decent to exist in the article list so that we could be perceived as having sufficiently broad coverage. A redlink was a mark of shame for us all, and the goal was to leave no stone unturned. This resulted in the WP:MISSING projects, which were largely successful in creating a large base of coverage so that no one could accuse us of not having an article on [x]. This was totally understandable given that the community's biggest asset was speed and a widely-distributed group of contributors (and knowledge bases). However, this also had the knock-on effect of making editors feel that we had to document Every. Nook. And. Crannie.

Although WP:NOT, WP:V, WP:N, and WP:NOR have done an admirable job in filtering out a lot of bad content which emerged from this article drive, the relentless goal of absolute breadth also weakened the project's long-term goals by both resulting in articles which experts and academics often were grossly unsatisfied with, and subsequently created a self-selected group of editors who - on the whole - were not as invested in creating "deep" articles.

The question to be asked now is more one of "How can we manage our growth and marshall our contributors towards more inward work?" That being - concentrating less on endless expansion and more towards stabilizing the content. In other words, less exponentialism (how close to 2 million articles?) and more refining work (how close to 20 thousand FAs?). Of course there will always be new topics which need articles, without a doubt. However, the development of things like required citations, assessment, and WP 1.0 implicitly seems to acknowledge that when Wikipedia as a whole is scrutinized on the basis of content - which is to say the actual meat of being an encyclopedia - it tends to come up short. Not necessarily massively so, but clearly at least mediocre. And if it is to survive in the long run and actually fulfill its mission, then the foundations - the core articles - need to be shored up a great deal.

WikiProjects have helped in this regard when they are well-oiled. But as you've mentioned, most WPs are just as dependent on a small handful of people as the articles are. This is only true to a degree - I find that often it's that the scope of the project that matters as well. Projects which are too overwhelming such as History or Media tend not to attract specialists, who would rather be amongst people mostly in their interest. Projects too specialized risk having too small of a participant-base to run autonomously. Mid-level projects with task forces tend to do best. I would also wager to say that this is a similar problem with articles - the big topics often are too big to be tackled by editors - they're too scary to manage. The minutiae ones have one or two main editors, and either are woefully glancing and amateurish or painstakingly immaculate (and thus often become the more "curious" FA articles). Things in the middle are most ripe for development.

Another thing I think needs addressing are the potentially-large number of articles which probably deserve either AfD or merging. How many vanity bios, for instance, have gone undetected or survived initial AfD two years ago but now are left unmaintained and unregarded? How much content can we legitimately delete or fold back into larger articles more likely to be FA-worthy in scope? It would be interesting to be able to not only see the most dormant articles, but the most dormant articles which exclude minor and bot edits.

Anyway, this is practically a whole essay in itself so I think I'll just wrap this all up! Look forward to continuing the discussion with you (and others). :) Girolamo Savonarola 03:30, 31 July 2007 (UTC)