Chapter 10 was entirely about content disagreements among editors—how to minimize them and how to resolve them. When there are other editors very interested in an article, any major change is going to meet with skepticism, if not outright opposition. If you’re working on a really bad article that needs a major overhauling, you have three choices:
Make series of incremental changes to the article.
Make specific proposals on the article talk page.
Rewrite the article in your user space, or a subpage of the article talk page, and discuss that rewrite on the article talk page.
This section discusses the first approach, which is generally quicker to implement, and well-suited for articles without active editors who may oppose a major overhauling. It has the advantage of being easier for other editors (who may just be checking the changes to make sure they’re not vandalism) to follow what you’re doing, and thus to maintain the assumption of good faith (shortcut: WP:AGF) that you’re not trying to slip something by other editors.
Warning
Don’t reorganize a major, established article (one that has lots of edits in the article history, lots of comments on the talk page, lots of interested editors, and so on) by simply starting to edit it. The organization of such an article represents a consensus, albeit an informal one. You should post advance notice on the talk (discussion) page about anything you’d like to do that’s more major than shuffling a few subsections around.
The first step in overhauling an article is to move information around so it’s better organized. In this step, don’t add or delete any text except headings. If that means a section ends up being lengthy because of a lot of redundant information, that’s okay at this stage of changing the article. Some specifics:
The goal here is to create a better structure for the article. By not deleting any information, other editors can focus on whether or not the organization is better, rather than arguing about additions or deletions. Your goal at this point isn’t to get sections to read smoothly; just to cut and paste information to get it into the right section or subsection.
Don’t put or keep controversies and criticisms in a separate section. Instead, integrate them into the article.
Don’t ignore the lead section. It should be a short introduction and summary, not long and filled with content not found in the rest of the article. Either move excess information out of the summary, or, if you think editors may be particularly attached to the lead section as is, copy all excess information to where it should be, and deal with cleaning up the lead section later in the process.
Use headings and subheadings to indicate the direction you think the article should go. Short sections are fine, but you need at least a paragraph to justify a heading. Don’t add headings if there’s no content for a section, and don’t add content in order to justify a heading.
In your edit summary, explain what you did. It’s very important to clearly state that you were reorganizing the article, and that nothing was added or deleted.
Once you’ve got a good organization for an article, even if it’s incomplete, you want to switch to editing section by section. Section-by-section editing assuages suspicions by letting other others clearly see what you’re doing. Moreover, if someone objects to an edit of one section, that objection doesn’t impact the improvements you’re making to other sections.
The goal in this second step is to make the best of the text that already exists, and to do so in as non-controversial a manner as possible. Fix one section, save the edit, go on to another section, save the edit, and so on—don’t do multiple sections in a single edit. Here are some rewriting tips:
Remove duplicate information. You often find the same sentence, or variants of it, in multiple places in the article. You don’t need to say something twice, so remove one of them.
Note
Don’t remove citations at this point. If you end up with two (or more) citations for the same sentence, so be it.
Don’t add information. Add bridging or transitional text where needed (“Back in India,” or “For example,”), but don’t add anything that needs a source, since you’re not adding citations at this step. Moreover, since you’re deleting information (see the next point), other editors are less likely to object if it’s clear that your goal isn’t to replace their text with yours.
Put the remaining information into a logical sequence, and copyedit for encyclopedic tone. That may require removing entire unverifiable sentences (for example, “Smith was admired and respected by all his friends and neighbors.”). Just don’t delete any information that seems plausible, though unsourced. Someone might still find a verifiable source.
Removing an unverifiable sentence could mean removing an unacceptable source for that sentence, such as a blog. That’s fine—the problem and its problem source are really one and the same.
Make sure your edit summary explains what you’re doing. When you rewrite a section, your edit summary should explain what you did and, ideally, provide a pointer to policy; for example, Cleanup per [[WP:NPOV]] and [[WP:V]]; no new content was added.
After you do rewrites as outlined in this section, you can expect that the only challenges to your edits—other than other editors tinkering with them a bit—is perhaps a complaint or two about removed information. If you were careful to remove only unverifiable, unsourced information, complaints are unlikely. But if other editors object, refer them to WP:V and ask them to explain how the information you removed is consistent with those policies, or just ask them for a good source so you can put the information back.
Note
Some Wikipedia articles include text, images, or links that many people find objectionable. If these are relevant to the content of the article, then they belong in the article. Nor does Wikipedia use disclaimers. There is no child-safe version of Wikipedia; editors who support such a concept should to try to get a change made to the policy WP:NOT, which includes a section called “Wikipedia is not censored”.