Matthew Brown wrote: > On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Ian Woollard <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Another issue that admins are quite prone to (along with many seasoned >> editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective of articles. >> > > Very true, and I suspect most people will get all protective of an > article they've put a lot of time into. The other half of the problem > is that edits from a new user who just happens along are often bad, > stylistically at least, and thus easy to respond negatively to even if > they have a good point inelegantly expressed. >
Yeah, it's sort of tricky, because both are clearly problems, but I think these are somewhat different problems from uncivil admins or senior/seasoned/whatever-you-call-it Wikipedians. I see more of the "cabal of very active editors owning an article" problem in controversial areas. I know I don't bother editing in Israel/Palestine space most of the time because I figure every article is probably owned by some group of people from one side or the other, and I don't want to expend the time to deal with figuring out how I'm "allowed" to contribute through that screen. There are a few other nationalism-related areas I stay out of for similar reasons (Poland-related articles seem to be tricky more often than you'd think, for example). But the problematic editors aren't always senior, but sometimes are just people who've managed to set up shop for long enough to be a problem, especially in a niche. One of the earliest ArbCom cases involved Mr Natural Health, someone who had been "owning" a bunch of health-related articles, and was a problematically active but not particularly senior or process-aware Wikipedian. And actually seasoned Wikipedians are often useful in fixing these situations if they crop up in isolated niches--- one of the most effective ways to break a cabal's hold over a particular group of articles is to bring them to the attention of a wider community of editors that can swoop in and impose the usual NPOV and WP:V and whatnot in place of that cabal's idiosyncratic take on the matter. But I'm not sure a general attempt to keep people from owning articles is a good solution, either. In many cases, probably a greater number numerically, there's the opposite problem. As has been widely noted even off-wiki, our very good articles have a tendency to revert towards the mean, and there's no particularly good mechanism to keep that from being the default without a lot of constant maintenance effort. That's not really a Wikipedia-insiders vs. outsiders issue, either, as many of the articles that started out good and later degenerated were written by newbies (often academics in a particular area). In fact, those are the ones that tend to degenerate the most, as occasional contributors write a great article but then don't stay around to protect it from junk being added. From that perspective, I'd say most good articles don't have *enough* protectors. As per Murphy's law, the protectors are all off protecting bad articles instead. ;-) But I might have a biased sample, since the areas I edit in seem to accumulate cruft. Good computer-science articles on general subjects invariably degrade with drive-by additions of pet language examples to the point where an article that might've once given a readable overview of a concept is an unreadable mess of "well in Haskell, the syntax looks like this, and in Scala, it looks like this, and you can also do it in Smalltalk, but slightly differently, like this". History articles on subjects even remotely popular also have a tendency to revert towards a pastiche of pop-history junk (often with nationalist mythologizing), unless someone is actively trying to maintain them. But I think this is a much trickier and more subtle issue than admin-civility or seasoned-editors-vs-newbies. Some articles need fewer drive-by edits by newbies adding uncited content, repetition of urban legends, or degredation of what was previously a readable exposition; one way to get that is more watchlisting and beating back of unhelpful 'improvements'. Other articles need less attention from people with very strong opinions about the subject. -Mark _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
