[WikiEN-l] Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

Mon Sep 13 15:27:44 UTC 2004

On 13 Sep 2004, at 15:47, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 10
> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 09:44:46 -0400
> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>>
> I can imagine at least one scenario that would lead to a bit of a fork,
> although whether it's a bad thing is not clear:
>
> Imagine that we have experts of some sort working on an article.  They
> hash out between them and the others editing an article something
> reasonably neutral, and it becomes the "stable" version.  A few months
> later, they come back, and the article has been editing by 500 people 
> in
> the meantime and become mostly a mess.  They decide to take a few of 
> the
> good facts and improvements from the new version and "backport" them to
> the previous stable version rather than dealing with the mess of the
> development version, because frankly the last stable version was better
> (except for the few facts that were duly incorporated).  That'd be a
> fork of sorts, I suppose.
>
> Of course, something similar happens on occasion already, which has 
> been
> the subject of some revert wars...
>
> -Mark

This is precisely why I've insisted here

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030521.html

that

>> The review club would not edit. No editing would take place on the
>> stable branch. The job of the review club would only be to determine
>> whether "wiki" versions can be promoted to "stable". If an article
>> needs editing, the review club would say so on the talk page. Review
>> club members could edit ''in their other role of being regular
>> contributors'', but these edits would be treated ''the same as any
>> other contributor's edits''.

-- Jens