On 2011-02-07, Robert Greene wrote:
Wikipedia is very good in some ways, but it has one great failing: Once something is up, it is quite hard to modify it.
If you bump up against this, invoke "Be Bold". Also, more often than not, it's a good idea to be ridiculously bold and do a complete rewrite of at least an entire section, if not the complete article. I mean, most people on long-standing technical lists like this one, and you as a particular example, can produce eloquent and accurate prose that is very, very difficult to outright revert without an outrage.
For example, some of the material on small room acoustics was clearly written by people who are selling passive treatment devices and took good care to bad-mouth DSP room correction in fallacious ways. I tried to make changes in this with little success.
I wonder if you (and that should really be in plural as well) spent enough effort towards the goal. If simple prose doesn't cut it, the usual process is to first add what you know, while giving references. Then go over questionable additions from other people, visibly marking them as needing a citation. After that, initiate a discussion on the talk page. And if the matter still cannot be brought under control, then go to the "powers that be".
I'm not the most reliable partner in doing this sort of thing, but wrt active correction, I would be interested in correcting whatever is wrong with it. (And "it" usually means editing a number of related pages as well.) Plus, I really think it could help if you could recruit some of the expertise here and on other fora -- under Wikipedia's guidelines, even the most obstinate person can't really go on forever when confronted with enough hard facts and persistent attention to an issue. Not unless we're talking about a genuine troll, who's then outright excludable under the guidelines.
Once someone has jumped in with an article, even one that is higly prejudiced or even flat out wrong, it is not easy to rectifiy the situation.(this is also true about mathematics, where the fast fingered got in there early to be sure that their own work received the lion's share of the attributions of credit. One can rely on Wikip. only if all the players are dead long since--and not even then, as one sees about Blumlein).
Sadly this is partly true. Even the most formal topics, like pure math, suffer from personal chemistry, politics, economical pressure and whatnot. But I for one like to think that a freely editable encyclopedia of general scope, like Wikipedia, should have lots of people who can take a look at disputes from an angle which isn't that much tied up with the particularities of a given subject issue. And that most of the people editing it wouldn't want to be publicly caught participating in the kinds of ideological or economical (edit) wars which earlier tended to be kept squarely out of sight.
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - [email protected], http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
