For more than 90% of articles, there have been no reversion wars. The
latest version is accurate, uncontroversial and fairly well
spell-checked & copy-edited.
Of the remaining 10% of articles, there are some subjects which would
benefit from some sort of approval marking system. Still, I hope for
these that we will include the 'development version' along with any
'approved' versions in Wikipedia 1.0 print or DVD publications.
For that fraction of 1% which are highly controversial, approval marking
is not really an issue. No academic or cleric has sufficient authority
to settle the hottest disputes of our times.
So let's concentrate on putting into effect a system which will boost
consumer acceptance of 90% to 99% of our articles. Librarians aren't
warning students against our global warming or Invasion of Iraq articles
-- or at least we don't care much if they do. But it would be nice if
our math and physics articles, as well as our non-controversial history
and biology articles, could get some respect.
Ed Poor
Who has thought about this a lot, while reading Snow, Mayer, et al.
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Snow [mailto:wikipedia@earthlink.net]
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 1:29 AM
To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia
Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com>
wrote:
>Last time I ventured my two cents concerning the print
Wikipedia, the
>response I got led me to conlcude that there
was no support for
>forking Wikipedia even in the slightest to make the content more
>acceptible -- which is what any approval board would end up doing.
>Then the project seemed to go into hibernation. Then it
seemed that a
>group was working on it. Now it appears we are
back to
discussing what
should be
done.
What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at
*all* - the only thing that will be done is selecting one
version of an
article that is approved in some way. Any future
approved
version would
be based on the development version (that is, a
regular Wikipedia
article which would be in perpetual development), not the
last stable
version.
If we adopt a formal approval system, the idea that all
future approved
versions will be based on development versions, rather than the last
approved "stable" version, sounds naively idealistic to me.
Even without
an approval system, this is already not the case on some of our more
contentious articles. When changes are not agreed on quickly,
one side
or the other, and sometimes both, may adopt the tactic of
reverting back
to an earlier version of which it "approves". However, since
the sides
generally do not approve of the same version, the dispute
continues and
often results in a revert war.
Any system that marks a particular revision as "approved" or "stable"
will inherently increase the temptation to blindly revert
changes back
to the "stable" revision, instead of trying to work with
those changes
and improve the article. This is already a problem in some places and
among some editors (no names, this is not an invitation for
finger-pointing). If we want to implement a system that lets
people flag
specific article revisions, let's at least be aware of the possible
downsides to this as well.
--Michael Snow