User:Filll/essaydraft

Controversial article maintenance; one method that worked

Let me tell you a little story. Let's consider evolution, which is currently an FA-rated article. Now if you look at evolution, it has improved drastically and outside reviewers have even said it was pretty good [1].

However, just a year or two ago, evolution was embattled and under siege. Huge attacks by hordes of creationists and POV warriors. It was downgraded from an FA on February 7, 2007 and maybe wasn't even a GA anymore. The evolution article was getting worse steadily, while editors quit one after another and the article slowly was eroding. It was a constant effort to even slow the decline as things got worse and worse, and there were extremely heated fights on the talk page between pro and anti-science forces.

What happened to turn it around?

Well, the Wikipedia editors at the evolution article did several things:

• We created an FAQ on the talk page, so the same question would not be answered thousands of times
• We organized the archives to avoid arguing the same thing 10,000 times, so we could just point to the previous discussion, now organized by topic instead of date.
• We created a new article, Introduction to evolution, to draw off people from the main page who did not understand it anyway, and to reduce fighting between groups that wanted a more sophisticated professional article and those that wanted a more accessible article
• We farmed out the troll bait and creationist material to a suite of daughter articles, mostly well written and addressing the most common complaints by creationists
• We started aggressively deleting any comments from antiscience trolls from the talk page, as well as any off-topic discussion (per [2])
• Aggressive POV pushers were directed to other wikis more appropriate for their views like Conservapedia, Research ID, CreationWiki, Creedopedia, Iron Chariots, Wikinfo and others.
• People who wanted to debate instead of write an encyclopedia were directed to talk.origins or other sites that feature debates on the subject.

The attacks slowed and then almost completely ceased. Then the work on the article could actually focus on improving the article, instead of defending it from ignorant jerks of various flavors. And it improved. And is still improving as a result.

We spend much less effort on maintaining and protecting evolution and it is a better article, and most new edits go towards real improvements, not nonsense. The goal here is to increase the efficiency; more output per unit of input. And therefore get better content into Wikipedia for the amount of effort that is expended.

If we can create systems to make us more effective and efficient by reducing some of the problems, as we did on a small scale at evolution, then that is a good thing, right?

I do not propose this procedure necessarily for all articles, but evolution is a very important subject, so it was worth the effort. And yes, I know many of the daughter articles since I contributed to several of them.

Appendix

Some attacks have resurfaced at evolution in early 2008. Therefore, another approach is being tried. The evolution article is kept locked, and any suggested changes are placed on a sandbox version of the article. If the admins who are monitoring the evolution article agree that those suggested changes are reasonable, they are transferred to the article itself. This is an interesting experiment, somewhat like Wikipedia:Flagged revisions, and we will have to watch closely to see how it progresses.

Examples of daughter articles and related articles on controversial material

• evolution as theory and fact (done with User:Orangemarlin, which I am planning to rewrite, and have partially rewritten in a sandbox; it looks a bit ugly since it was one of my first articles)
• objections to evolution (done with User: Silence, but User:Orangemarlin and I wrote huge sections of it and we have more material to use in a rewrite)
• level of support for evolution (which is going to be rewritten to be cleaner and shorter and is being rewritten in a sandbox)
• creation-evolution controversy (done before me but slowly being cleaned up and rewritten with User:Hrafn)
• creationism (again done before me but slowly being cleaned up and rewritten with User:Hrafn and others, and includes probably a dozen daughter pages as well)
• intelligent design (done before me but I have helped with it, and includes about 150-200 daughter pages as well, of which I have contributed about 20 or more)
• falsifiability of evolution (not yet in the mainspace, but slowly being written and rewritten in a sandbox) and several others.
• Also, there are Simple Wikipedia versions of evolution, principally by a now-departed editor, and intelligent design, principally by a now-departed editor, and the attendant daughter pages on Simple Wikipedia, which are also useful in this regard.
• There are articles which try to cover linguistic aspects like evolution (term) and evolution (disambiguation), since language misunderstandings can cause all kinds of problems typically.
• There is a section of an article reached by Misconceptions about evolution that is also a point by point summary, and used to be a much longer separate article.

There are also many daughter articles to evolution that are more advanced than evolution itself, and cover special details, like evidence of evolution, or modern evolutionary synthesis, or evolution of complexity, and probably at least a couple of hundred more.

So that gives a small sample of some of what has been done to try to fix things. And miraculously, it was fairly successful. However, it was so much work and required so many man hours of so many people including a large number of experts, that I would not suggest it in all cases. Instead, I would suggest trying to find new ways to do the same thing, but in a more efficient way.