Bryan Derksen wrote:
Personally, all I really want out of a sifter-type
process is "this
has been checked and is not blatantly vandalized or currently an
active battleground, and the spelling looks okay to me." IMO a sifter
like this would take a lot of stress off of editors who, rightly or
wrongly, feel the need to keep a constant watch over articles and
"fix" them instantly when problems crop up. It would also allow us to
feel comfortable stamping ten thousand CDs without the fear that the
database dump was taken at the exact moment a vandal stuck in
something dreadful that is now immortalized in dimpled aluminium. All
the standard Wikipedia disclaimers should still apply.
Once we have that, then maybe we can start looking at ways to produce
an even more rigorously proofed versions that includes fact checking.
I'm not in a hurry. :)
This sounds like exactly the right approach to me. What's more, it fits
nicely with the incremental-improvement process we've used so far.
Writing top-quality articles from scratch a la Nupedia turned out to be
fairly hard, but incrementally improving articles has worked quite
well. Incrementally verifying articles might likewise have some
advantages over trying to make a leap from "this could be anything,
including random vandalism" to "this has been verified by experts in the
field as the Perfect Article". There's always a risk of *too* much
complication, but a few simple levels of verification, starting with
"this revision is not vandalized, not in the midst of an edit war, and
not obviously glaringly bad", would be nice.
-Mark