[WikiEN-l] Page freezing on "good" articles

Sun Oct 30 01:26:24 UTC 2005

Sure, but I'm not arguing for permanence. I'm saying, make it so that
people have to discuss changes first. That's all. Which is
considerably less barriers than EB puts up to editing their articles.

And if an article is, at some point, thought to require some extensive
editing, then unfreeze it. Simple as that.

Anyway, it's just an idea I thought I would throw out, see if anything
interesting stirred up out of it. So far I'm not convinced of the
arguments against it, which seem to be based on the idea that all
edits to all articles lead them to better places than they currently
are. I think experience tells us this is not true and that without a
team of dedicated editors knowledgeable about that particular article,
articles stagnate in unpleasant and unreliable ways. I haven't seen a
solid suggestion to stop this, though (I'm still unsure how an article
rating system would really work to end this effect).

FF

On 10/28/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Geoff Burling wrote:
>
> >The continuing arguments around VfD/AfD suggests that some of the
> >community does not understand -- or believe -- that there is a goal
> >to this project, a place where our Wiki will eventually end. I suspect
> >that FF has found another end point to our Wiki.
> >
> >
> Britannica has been editing and rewriting and adding to their
> encyclopedia for two hundred and thirty-seven years now, with no sign
> that they're planning to stop changing stuff and publish the "Final
> Encyclopedia" any time soon. Why do you think Wikipedia is likely to
> start reaching an "endpoint" any time in the forseeable future? I think
> a version-rating method is probably vital in the near future to prevent
> our best articles from backsliding, we've become good enough in many
> areas that IMO this is a real concern. But we're nowhere near "done,"
> and since the corpus of human knowledge is itself constantly changing I
> doubt we ever will be.
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