Fast Fission wrote,
There was a lot of talk not too long ago about
possibilities of
protecting certain high-profile articles which are reasonably "good",
in order to prevent various forms of content degredation which happen
even with well-meaning editors, much less from vandals and the
problems which come up in problematic reverts, etc.
Is there a designated place to discuss this sort of thing?
In my mind, it would make sense to have some sort of "Vote for
Freezing" page for articles of this sort. It would be almost the
opposite of something like VfD -- an advanced form of FAC, whereby
people would vote (and ply some attention on) as to whether an article
was good enough to qualify it for this sort of enshrinement. "This
article is good enough that it doesn't need people to be able to edit
it constantly without discussing changes first," the status of
"frozen" would imply. Some standards would need to be developed (a FA
which has already run on the main page, another round of peer review,
no major rewrites in the past two months, etc.) but it could work out
(hopefully). Requests for Unfreezing could be done as well for those
who think that an article was problematically frozen in a state which
would require more than just the sorts of line edits one can do from a
talk page.
So anyway, I'm not caught up on the latest status of this debate, but
I think something of this sort might be a good idea, and prevent the
sort of incoherence that sneaks into even good articles over a long
period of time.
(And before anyone points out that this would make it hard for new
users to edit such articles -- that would be the *point* of such a
policy, not an unintended consequence. And it would, ideally, focus
users away from such articles and onto the legions which still need
basic work).
FF
The only thing I can imagine is this: when a page has reached this state it
is usually through the hard work of a few editors (and I am not trying to
deny the contributions of countless other people). I suggest those editors
save that version of the article as sub-pages to their user pages. If
there is ever major vandalism of the article, or if it seriously degrades
over a long period of time, those editors have a point of reference
(without having to go back through the edit history) of when they thought
of it as "done."
(consider this a supplement to providing links to pages you are proud of,
on your user page)
I understand if those editors have left wikipedia in the meantime, such
saved pages may go with them. I do not consider this a tragic loss as far
as the articles go, since there always is the edit history (although if
this happens a lot it would be worth thinking about why contributors to
great articles are leaving).
But let's assume most don't go away. What constitutes a great version of
an article is subjective; my suggestion allows versions that are great from
at least one person's point of view to be preserved, without in anyway
undermining the wikiness of the article itself. By the way, I think some
users already do this or something like this anyway.
Steve
Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701