[Wikipedia-l] beta/stable ideas

Wed May 22 19:27:26 UTC 2002

> There are at least two big questions about how this
> ought to work:
> 
> 1) How do we get new folks to dive in and
> contribute? Having your
> improvements show up *immediately* is a big draw to
> the wikipedia
> experience.

Well, we could call it beta and stable if we wanted to
and people could know that the beta version was more
up-to-date than the stable version.  A lot of people
at Wikipedia are here just to read and they can keep
doing that and others are here to write and I suggest
we have a link on the bottom of each stable article
that says, "Edit this article in Beta".  I imagine all
of us would still just watch the beta anyway.  :)

> 2) How does the review process work? If very few
> people are interested in
> a topic, a new article or change might get
> completely ignored, and very
> good articles may never be seen; so limiting
> reviewing to certain trusted
> users would likely not be sufficient. On the other
> hand, it's child's
> play for organized vandals to set up secondary
> accounts to mod up their
> own work, as many discussion-oriented sites have
> discovered on
> establishing user-run comment moderation systems.

This is of course the hardest part.  Let's form a
Cabal!  :)  When there's enough positive reviews from
enough experienced users (maybe those signed up for
over 3 months) and *no* negative reviews (all negative
reviews should have a reason why they voted negative)
then the article makes it to stable.  If someone is
found abusing the system, they could be knocked back
to standard user with a 3 month waiting period to get
back.

This is only a suggestion!  The values of course could
be tweaked, but I think this could work.  It needs to
a) not cause ppl to try to do things to improve their
possibilities of getting in the "Cabal" (um, reviewing
committee), i.e. time works well for this and b) not
easily subject to abuse and c) it needs to be simple!

We need to have a base idea to start a system like
this, so I'm presenting one that we can discuss.

Chuck

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