On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 3:14 PM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2009/11/16 Ryan Delaney <ryan.dela...@gmail.com>: > >> No argument there. What's important about this case is that (as it has been >> explained to me, anyway) someone was deliberately writing a bad article with >> the express intention of being a pain in the ass. That's gaming the system >> in a disruptive way to make some kind of political point, and we generally >> frown on that for obvious reasons. > > > Yes, that's just being silly. A test is to write an article as if > you're not a known experienced editor, but still try to do a > reasonable job on it.
I partially disagree. Writing a "bad article" - unreferenced, poor grammar, etc - on a subject which is not yet covered and yet which clearly meets our notability and topic requirements and whose notability and validity can be easily established with web searches - is an excellent experiment. Part of the challenge here is not just "What if a nobody comes along and creates an ok article". Part of the challenge is whether we handle new clueless nobodies well, when they have a good article idea but no idea how Wikipedia does things, yet. That's what doing a bad-ish article tests. Writing an intentionally bad article in the "there's no reason to have an article on this" isn't particularly good - we can find enough of those in new page patrol logs and CSD deletion logs - spam, opinion pieces, vandalism, random graffiti, BLPs of schoolchildren, etc. without doing experiments, I think, unless we think we need some control cases done by the same testers. Keep in mind that this was a very ad-hoc experiment, and by normal protocols horribly run. That said, it's also horribly important, and has (despite the flaws) given some extremely important data. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l