User:Martynas Patasius/Perfect is the enemy of good

Perfect is the enemy of good. This saying sometimes also applies to Wikipedia.

What does it mean?

This saying is used when there are several alternatives that have different value. Usually one of those alternatives is much better than others ("perfect"), but "expensive" (for example, it might require a lot of work). In such case, striving to implement the "perfect" alternative can lead to failure to consider or rejection of "good" alternatives that are "cheaper" and better than the existing situation, while being worse than "perfect". Eventually the "perfect" alternative often stays unimplemented, neither are "good" alternatives. Situation stays unimproved, which is worse than implementation of "perfect" or "good" alternatives.

For this reason this saying encourages one to avoid the haste in rejection of "good" alternative that might improve the situation at least a little, even if there is a better "perfect" alternative.

Applications in Wikipedia

Hopeless articles

Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion (lt:Vikipedija:Beviltiški straipsniai from Lithuanian Wikipedia is an even stronger example) describes one such case: articles that are especially unsuitable for Wikipedia. In that case the "perfect" alternative is to clean the article up, while the "good" alternative – to delete the article or to replace it with a much shorter well written text. It is obvious that cleaning the article up is much better, but that doesn't happen that often. Thus sometimes one of the "good" alternatives can be chosen.

Tags

Another case concerns adding tags. In that case the "perfect" alternative is to clean the article up, while the "good" alternative is to add a tag pointing out some problems.

"Other articles" argument

As described in Wikipedia:Don't make perfect the enemy of better, sometimes users oppose some improvement in a given article claiming that one must first make the same change in other articles. In that case the "perfect" alternative is making the same improvement in all articles, while the "good" alternative is making the change in the given article.

Other side of application

This essay has a different side: "good" alternative is not to be replaced by "bad" (making things worse). For example, adding a badly written and misleading text to an article is not an improvement compared with doing nothing.