Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Where have all the copyeditors gone?
This article, about a zoo in India, may very well have been written by the monkeys in the zoo. Setting aside several glaring grammatical errors ("It the first public zoo in India."), it has no organization at all. Under "Suggested days to visit" (not exactly an encyclopedic heading) we find "The maps provided are inaccurate and misguiding." Well, that might be true, but what does that do with choosing a day to visit. The real gem here, though is this: "The nocturnal house is extremely smelly, almost necrogenic." Necrogenic! I've never encountered that word before, but what a lovely word to describe a zoo! And the "see also" list is filled with all sorts of random topics, most of which are only tangentially connected. I'm especially perplexed by the reference to Heini Hediger, who appears to be about as related to this zoo as would Steve Irwin. What does this German zoologist have to do with this particular zoo?
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Where have all the copyeditors gone?
ReplyDeleteMost intelligently people are immediately taken with wikipeda and try an edit or two. Then, within a short period of time, they realize that the effort is futile. What kind of a person is interested in creating a quality article, only to watch it rot away? How many articles have you written that were later improved with something like the following - Hey everybody, look at me, I have an engorged penis!.
People interested in creating something of durable quality are the least likely people to want to babysit it afterwards. When you think about it, the motivation behind creating something durable is precisely so that you don't have to keep fixing it in perpetuity. This reality is the number one de-motivator of good editors.
As long as wikipedia doesn't have any reversion control or stable versions or whatever, a huge portion of capable editors won't bother to waste their time with copy editing or creating content.
Just imagine a new fork where you needed to register a user account with a valid email in order to edit. Bam! ninety nine percent of the vandalism is gone. What if the leadership was merit based, instead of social climbing and irc whoring based? What if there was an actual review and promotion system (for mature articles) to make sure they continued to improve instead of deteriorate? What if the most important thing was creating great content?
The quality would be be much better and the type of people choosing to work there would be better.
The foundation could do something like this without much effort. Don't they have a Chief Research Officer? What the hell has he done during his tenure?
Great post Kelly, you've nailed wikipedia's number one problem.
hapened to be doing work on Hediger. Turns out that the government of India commissioned him to design the zoo.
ReplyDelete(ref; Hediger, 1985. A lifelong attempt to understand animals. In: Dewsbury, D. A. (ed.), Leaders in the Study of Animal Behavior: Autobiographical Perspectives. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 144–181.)
...for what it's worth! :)