User talk:Johnbod/Content and coverage; where are we 10 years into the project?

Thoughts

Meant to comment on this a few days ago, but was distracted by the arguably-related fracas at DYK.

As a scientist by training, I'm inclined to regard article-writing on major topics as being somewhat like a literature review. Just as in teaching one has to have content knowledge that goes far deeper than the facts you intend to impart, you have to absorb a tremendous amount of background before you feel safe distilling it into an article and proclaiming it complete. Our sourcing policy is probably also a big source of drag: having to stud your magnum opus with citations like plums in a pudding will help steer you away from original research, POV, and so on, but knowing that you'll have to back up every sentence definitely slows the composition process.

Your observation that the number of edits that constructively add to articles seems to have dropped is interesting and insightful. It certainly correlates with my own experience. There certainly seems to be more and more energy going into those peripheral edits: add this infobox or that widget, develop a template, recategorize, robotically rate the article, etc. (I have to admit to doing a fair bit of this myself, because it's brain candy: something I can sit down and churn out without thinking too hard when I'm too tired or preoccupied for that.)

I think we are seeing the slow death of eventualism. Over the past year or two, I've seen two major disputes (one of which is still simmering) where editors were very prolifically creating very low-quality stubs. Our traditional view has been to extend great latitude to any content creation more productive then vandalism on eventualistic grounds; yes, OK, it's a stub, but someone might come along and extend it, and they might find those two or three robotically-constructed sentences useful as a basis for expansion, so let's not touch it. I am finding this less and less tenable. As an author with some ability to improve them, it's demoralizing to spend a tiring 20 minutes cleaning one up and discover that 20 new ones have appeared while so doing. As a reader, I think I'd be demoralized to find that blue links kept leading me to a page so low in information content as not to be worth reading—if the ratio of the fact-free to the good is too high, people stop looking for or expecting the good.

That said, I think there is a case to be made for esoteric articles as well as popular and general ones. While it's embarrassing to us that our coverage of some of these topics is so poor, those are also the topics that can most likely be grasped by reference to common sources of information outside of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a tremendous advantage in making good articles about narrow and obscure topics available online to anyone, obviating the need for difficult-to-procure specialist resources. To pluck an example from my own quiver, the number of people who need to know about the Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Ebensburg and Eastern Railroad must be very small. But for those very few who do, the ability to pull up a quite complete article rather than having to hunt down a copy of Adam's out-of-print book is invaluable, and I think that ability to get good summaries of narrow things that are not well described elsewhere is an important part of Wikipedia's value. Choess (talk) 07:05, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for reading & commenting! I'd agree with all that. It's certainly ideal to tackle a big topic with a depth of knowledge and sources, but as we are there are a large number of big topic articles that could be vastly improved by expansion by someone with little or no subject knowledge drawing doggedly on a couple of standard books - certainly in my area. Take a look at Indian art or Chinese art for example. Absolutely agree about eventualism - a term I forgot to use. I absolutely don't denigrate the breadth of WP coverage of "obscure" topics, & rather tend to divide my own editing between taking my own advice and tackling big 'uns (Islamic art) and the pretty obscure (Torrs Pony-cap and Horns) - ok maybe not as obscure as yours! But coverage of the latter is something we pretty much have fixed (the usual concerns apart). Like popular culture stuff, the coverage of general obscure stuff is one of our great strengths, and continues to grow. Coverage of major topics seems to me our current major weakness, and while improvements certainly happen, the pace is agonizingly slow. Johnbod (talk) 16:05, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Very interesting to revisit this: still good and thought-provoking. It would be fascinating to hear your latest thoughts (updates?) on the essay. The analysis of experts link has gone dead, by the way. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:44, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I don't think it has dated much. The decline in editing has continued at a slower rate, but with the most active editors stable or even increasing. Now nearly 45% of content is by editors with over 10,000 edits. The content trends have continued without much change I think, though I think FA reviewing has deteriorated somewhat. Indian art is still as crap as ever! Johnbod (talk) 21:49, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Mmm. More and more from fewer and fewer; and less and less from more and more... hmm. It does confirm my editing intuition that things are much quieter and more serious now - apart from the surface dross, articles either get left alone or totally rewritten, so stubs and half-written articles tend to stay that way for years. The good thing is that more articles are well thought out and properly cited. The challenge with FA, specially for big (e.g. Vital level 1 or 2) articles, is hurting the whole project. We need a way to encourage good editors to work on the most-seen topics (inevitably a lot of work), rather than making it a terrible struggle. After all, who wants to be an FAC reviewer? Perhaps that process is broken. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:28, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

BTW, perhaps there is exactly one editor, that you know well, who could sort out Indian art! Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:30, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

I know, and I have the books, but (so proving my own point in the diatribe) it's such a big topic I've never been able to face it so far. I did import the Indian section from when I did Sculpture in the Core Contest to Sculpture in the Indian subcontinent - maybe I should have added to the main one. One day I'll do it for the Core contest, if no one gets there first. But that no one has so far is something of a barometer to me of where our content editing is. Or perhaps I should just do it piece by piece. Johnbod (talk) 13:00, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Why not, one chunk improved at a time. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:05, 30 June 2014 (UTC)