User:Generalissima/Erosion

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

With enough time, even the greatest mountains will be leveled by the slow, steady force of wind, ice, and water. The effects of these forces are imperceptible in the moment, but become devastating when compounding over many years.

Vandalism is a pain, but it usually gets caught and reverted. An account inserting paragraphs of uncited text will likely be told off when noticed. What really destroys an article is many small, seemingly-constructive edits. Just as a mountain is leveled to the ground, there is a tendency for articles to return to a base state below our standard criteria for quality content.

Good and featured articles are usually the product of extensive work by one or a small group of editors. The latter is additionally subject to consensus by a number of meticulous reviewers. Even though they are generally promoted in an exceptional state, well-meaning tweaks by many editors over a long period of time will slowly disrupt their construction and require re-review, resulting in either salvage efforts or demotion. Although it is always important to assume good faith, this does not mean we should accept good faith contributions without regard to their quality.

Erosion

Anyone who has had to go through a grueling featured article candidacy will know how meticulously constructed an article must be to reach promotion. Although we would like to imagine that the wisdom of the masses would eventually push an article to an ideal state, an article can only really reach an elevated status through the coordinated actions of a single editor, or a small team of editors. Often a "FAC-push" requires reworking an article from the ground-up. And once it is submitted to FAC, it requires the consensus of a group of reviewers that the article is in an ideal state. However, despite the difficulties, many featured articles last only a decade or so before they are demoted.

Many common types of edit may appear constructive, and even contain unambiguously helpful changes, but nevertheless lead to a slight degradation in article quality:

Moving around sentences without caution, leading to claims no longer being aligned with the correct citation
Rephrasing that simplifies language but unintentionally alters meaning
Rephrasing that renders sentences less concise or intelligible
Rephrasing that introduces Manual of Style violations
Addition of information that has already been explained elsewhere in the article
Addition of correct information, but which is unnecessary or too specific in its focus
Corrections to information that don't change the source, leading to source-text misalignment
Addition of less reliable sources, especially web and news sources, to supplement claims already cited
Addition of new sources, but with incorrect or irregular formatting
Replacement of sources with sources that are less reliable but easier to access
Addition of unnecessary sections, images, or templates, often in an attempt for cohesion with older or less-polished articles on similar subjects

Often, although by no means exclusively, these sorts of edits are made by temporary accounts or by inexperienced users who may not understand what a good or featured article is, how it gets to that point, or what standards it has to meet. Although such tweaks are often reverted, not every page can be monitored at all times, and negative changes are often introduced alongside unambiguously helpful tweaks.

The highest-visibility articles are the ones which experience the highest rate of erosion, as greater numbers of readers makes it more likely one of them will make a change. However, these articles are also more erosion-resistant, as edits will likely show up on the watchlists of at least a few engaged editors. Very small articles—ones that get only a few views a day—are the least likely to be eroded, with months or years passing between edits. However, unless the original creator is active to maintain them, it is less likely other editors will catch any introduced errors. The articles most vulnerable to erosion are ones which get large amounts of views relative to the editor attention they receive.

As we strive endlessly to build the most expansive and informative encyclopedia we can, we have to ensure that we are not losing our best work faster than we can make it. It is a hard task to both ensure that our older quality content stays high-quality, while updating it to meet updating standards or new information. But if we can prolong the "lifespan" of our featured content, then the far-off, lofty dream of 100,000 feature-quality articles proposed early in the encyclopedia's history might be more plausible than we imagined. At a time where slop and misinformation are dominant on the web, we've become something of a bastion for freely-accessible but quality information, and we ought to strive for it to be as reliable and intelligible as we can keep it.

Anti-erosion measures

While we can never stop erosion entirely, there are ways we can mitigate it; either by slowing the rate it acts, or by repairing the damage it does.

What we can do now

Reversion

Unlike a real mountain, we can readily rewind a page to its prior glory by restoring an old revision—for a featured or good article, this would likely be the first revision after promotion. This has the drawback of removing any positive changes or updated information that has been added to the page in the meantime. For some pages, especially topics that change frequently (such as BLPs), this is a non-starter. For others, it might be as simple as copying a new paragraph or wording tweak from a newer revision back into the old revision. This option should always be considered at Featured article review or Good article reassessment; an editor who would have to painstakingly rework the page from the ground up could simply add some content to the version that was promoted, and it might be good as new.

Watchlist relevant articles

If you are knowledgeable about a particular subject area, try and place some featured and good articles (especially about the most visible topics) on your watchlist. Many erosive edits could be quickly spotted and reverted if only someone knowledgeable notices that they were made! If you notice a user making unhelpful or misguided edits, you ought to check what other edits they have made recently; they could be eroding other articles, too.

What we could change

Use page protection more often

Page protection, especially extended confirmed protection, is rarely applied outside of the most highly-visible articles. This is unfortunate, because many featured articles would benefit immensely from this protection; after all, the state of the article has been confirmed by consensus, and it ought to require at least some additional consensus to modify it. This wouldn't be applicable to all articles: those needing frequent updates should usually be exempt, such as BLPs, political parties, sport teams and competitions, militant groups, recent inventions and discoveries, etc.

This would be a fairly minor policy change—our guidance to admins on protections is fairly loose and lenient as it is—but it would be the most direct and effective way we could halt erosion. It would still allow well-meaning casual editors to contribute by the talk page, with the added benefit that such requests would have to be reviewed by an extended confirmed user.

Concluding thoughts

High up in the Internet in the land called Wikipedia, there stands a page. It is 60 kb in prose size and 8,000 words long. Once every few months a little editor comes to this page to tweak the wording. When that page has thus been worn away, then about ten or fifteen years have gone by, probably.

— Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind, 1921 (modified)