"Members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals hav lobbied, successfully in many places, for bylaws that make it more expensive to keep a breeding animal than to sterilize Man's closest enemy. If you liked the stray, then you'll love the kitten. It'll be coloured the way you want. It won't shed. With the right breed you can wear it in fifteen years."
The foregoing text was taken from Wikipedia's article on the domestic cat. I wish we had "blame" functionality so I could see how long this text has been here and who added it. Oh well.
The foregoing text was taken from Wikipedia's article on the domestic cat. I wish we had "blame" functionality so I could see how long this text has been here and who added it. Oh well.
We do have "blame" functionality - it's called the edit history. Slow and cumbersome to use, admittely, but one doesn't have to go back too far to find the revision of interest. Took me less than a minute.
ReplyDeleteAs of the revision you linked to, it had been there for 20 hours and 17 minutes. One hour and 27 minutes later, it was removed along with the rest of the above revision, presumably in response to this blog post.
It was contributed by a user who has been registered for eight months and has around 200 edits, just under half of which are to articles.
While it is obviously unencyclopedic and I agree with its removal, the edit certainly wasn't vandalism, and was probably made in good faith.
Clearly it passed by those who were watching for vandalism without being identified as such - as it should - and then issues with its content were not picked up either. This is unfortunate but hardly inexcusable.
While such an edit may have been caught earlier if our resources allowed every edit by every user, regardless of experience, to be scrutinized thoroughly, our resources simply don't stretch that far.
Thus, all I can really say is this: This is a wiki. These edits happen all the time, we are fully aware that they happen and they are a fact of life in a project that anyone can edit. Never has the "so fix it" argument been more relevant.
If you'd fixed the problem yourself, it would have been fixed an hour and 27 minutes before it was. It would probably have taken you less time to do so that it would to blog about it. Please consider this; there is no need to turn everything you come across into a complaint.
Open source is clearly a broken model. I compile all my applications from CVS HEAD every day and they're incredibly buggy and unstable. It's completely unfeasible as a working practice.
ReplyDeleteQxzzxq, "it certainly wasn't vandalism" ... "With the right breed you can wear it in fifteen years."
ReplyDeleteO_o
"If you'd fixed the problem yourself, it would have been fixed an hour and 27 minutes before it was."
You're missing the point. It's not like Kelly read all 2 million or so article pages and found this one instance of nonsense. There are huge amounts of utter rubbish on the site and "sofixit" by itself isn't going to solve the issue. We need to figure out how to change what we do in order to get there, but we're so opposed to change that it just isn't going to happen. .. at least not unless awareness is raised. Thus, Kelly's post.