[Wikipedia-l] road to stability, formatted. last kick-off posting.

Tue Dec 6 13:53:59 UTC 2005

--- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> The only way to give Wikipedia a "quality assurance" (limited to human
> errors, of course:-) would IMHO be a method where someone takes
> *professional* (not financial or legal:-) responsibility for the quality
> of an article. Also, this can't just be any user - user accounts are
> created far too easily for this. It needs to be someone who has the
> trust of the communtiy, someone with the "power" to say "this article
> version is good as it is", without having to defent this against trolls
> or revert-warring against vandals.
> 
> That directly leads to a (relatively) small, elite (!=cabal) group of
> peer reviewers. The cathedral filtering the bazaar, as I said before.
> This could be done externally (software's in the making), or within
> wikipedia. The latter would be nicer, however, it might lead to more
> conflict between those who can peer review and those who can not.
> 
> (It goes without saying that none of the above would alter the wiki in
> any way; it would be an additional feature with no technical impact on
> the normal Wikipedia editing).
> 
> I hope to have a demo site up shortly.

“The cathedral filtering the bazaar”

This sounds wonderful. Make it so! :) I don’t edit in the area I majored in (biology), but would
love to help filter in that area.

At a recent library conference I spoke at, I openly admitted that Wikipedia’s biggest problem is
that there is no stable/reference version; the whole thing is a draft. I think we now have enough
articles that are good enough in at least the larger wikis that we can start creating a stable
version that consists of snapshots of our good articles (featured articles are a different beast;
those are our best articles). 

Editing would go on as it does now and there would be no forks in development; periodically a new
snapshot of the development version will be taken to serve as the new stable version. A prominent
link to the stable version would be placed on top of the article and cur diffs between it and the
current development version would be added. People would need to log in and change their
preferences to see stable versions by default (the other way around would hide vandalism in the
development version; besides, the most recent/up-to-date version should be on top anyway). 

-- mav

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