Well... that does happen. It's basically WP:OWNership. I find that
ownership usually, but not always, stops an article reaching its
maximum quality and/or coverage.

But ownership doesn't seem to dominate the wikipedia. And sometimes if
the owner really is really good then the article can end up just fine.

On 16/02/2009, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Carl Beckhorn wrote:
>> Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be
>> worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the
>> following claim is quite accurate to my experience:
>>
>>   Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a
>>   random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most
>>   persistent and aggressive people who follow an article.
>>
>
> It is a nice use of rhetoric, but accurate? NOWAI!
>
> Let me paraphrase it in a way that will make the logical flaws
> more apparent.
>
> In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
>
> 1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
> quality.
>
> 2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
>
> 3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
>
> 4. Aggressive people who won't permit quality will
> follow an article.
>
> 5. Over the long term, the dynamics of wikipedias
> practices will not prevent editors who will not
> allow quality on wikipedia from dragging it down
> to the level that they aggressively and persistently
> insist on bringing it down to. There are no working
> heuristics to allow it to transcend that attractor.
>
> *Understanding* the logical flaws of those 5 statements
> is left to the student.
>
>
> Yours,
>
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>
>
>
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-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.

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