User:Visviva/Opinionations/Dust, cobwebs and mildew

The level of neglect across much of Wikipedia has reached the point where it is useful to have more precise terms for it. Here follows a three-part classification of certain common forms of article neglect, using the metaphors of cobwebs, mildew and dust.

Dust

Cobweb and dust

Dust is the basic residue of neglect. The wiki works through iterative improvement on each others' changes, and (within limits) the faster those changes come, the better it works. Even well-maintained articles have some dust, since people can't be working on everything all the time. But as work slows down, things get dustier. For example: a rough outline that someone tossed into an article 15 years ago has never been expanded; an awkward sentence construction hasn't been tweaked in a decade; and so forth.

For operational purposes, I define the thickness of a layer of dust by the time that has passed since there was focused attention on the article as shown by either a >500B non-vandalism-related edit or a series of smaller substantive edits. Thus, an article that has been visited only by bots and Twinkle operators since 2007 will, as of 2022, have a 15-year layer of dust on it. An article may be well-maintained in one section but have another section with a one- or even two-decade layer of dust on it.

Often, the dust in itself is the least of an article's problems. But until the layer of dust is removed by an editor giving the article sustained and focused attention, the other problems may not even be visible, let alone addressed.

Cobwebs

Cobwebs are situations in which neglect has led a page to fall out of compliance with formal or informal standards. Templates and categories may not be up to date, internal or external links may have rotted, citation formats may no longer be standards-compliant, and so forth.

On the wiki as in the home, cobwebs mostly become visible as a result of dust, so the distinction between the two categories may not always be clear-cut.

Mildew

Artist's conception of a Wikipedia article and two readers.

Mildew occurs when neglect has led the article, or parts of it, to become misleading or otherwise significantly disserve the reader. On the wiki as in the home, mildew can't simply be painted over or brushed aside: article mildew requires the focused attention of an editor with some knowledge of the subject matter.

Mildew may spread purely as a result of non-editing: perhaps a statement about what is the case "currently" or "today" was formerly true and verifiable, but is now false. "Currently the mayor of Whoville is John Smith" may have been true when it was written in 2012. But if John Smith was voted out in 2015, it is now an example of article mildew that actively misleads the reader. Changing it to "As of 2012, the mayor of Whoville was John Smith" paints over the mildew so it is non-false, but still disserves the reader who is likely more interested in who the mayor is now.

Mildew also sometimes arises through editing, when an editor updates one part or aspect of an article without updating others. For example, the lead section of an article may gradually drift away from the sections it ostensibly summarizes, or may even come to contradict those sections, if editors are focusing their work (as most of us do) on a particular section without stepping back to consider the article as a whole.

A particularly pernicious form of article mildew is citation mildew. Suppose we have "Currently the mayor of Whoville is John Smith.<ref>citation for Smith.</ref>". After Smith's term ends, a well-intentioned editor updates this information but does not update the citation: "Currently the mayor of Whoville is Alice Gunderson.<ref>citation for Smith.</ref>." This edit provides better value to readers overall (most of whom won't particularly care about citations), but at a steep cost: if no one checks and updates the citation, then the information will be unsupported while falsely appearing to be properly verified.

These forms of edit-induced mildew come about as a result of laudable attempts to update and improve the article, which however occur in the absence of a sufficient level of community attention. We edit articles on the assumption that our work will be iteratively improved upon, but when that iterative process ceases to function, our articles and readers suffer.