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 | This page in a nutshell: Major incidents produce rapidly evolving articles. This essay outlines the challenges of developing these articles and offers practical strategies for improving the evolution of the article. Wikipedia is a work in progress and editors need to achieve a balance between keeping the article to a high quality, improving the article and creating an pleasant experience for other editors. |
In the immediate aftermath of major incidents such as man-made disasters, natural disasters and terrorist attacks, editors flock to create and grow new articles. Such pages often become a source of major conflict. Yet within a few days, the excitement dies down and editors will polish the article into a better one. This article is about how to do the best job of growing the page in those first few days.
One approach to such pages is to demand perfection in an article. We immediately delete any contributions that in any way reduce the perfection of the article. An editor makes an referenced contribution. Delete it! An editor makes a contribution that does not fit with the flow of the article. Delete it! The problem with this approach is that it just leads to editors wasting their time, effort and enthusiasm in arguments. Moreover, Wikipedia is a work in progress. There is no requirement that the page be perfect. Another approach would be to dump as much information on the page as possible. However this would clearly leave a huge mess for later editors to clean up.