Gerrit Holl wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
* this can be gamed (mark it as a minor edit, or
write "google" under
sources, or give some non-existing or out-of print book, or a book in an
obscure language, or set up your own fake page and then give it as
source, or...)
What's wrong with using an out-of-print book as a source?
It might be the only source for this 18-people remote saami village in
the Kiruna municipality of Lapland?
Nothing's wrong with that.
But if I were a subtle vandal and had to cite my sources, I might cite
some out-of-print book, hoping noone will get a hold of a copy soon.
Thus, using "cite your sources" to prevent subtle vandalism doesn't work.
As Brion already stated correctly, the current
Wikipedia is an eternal
beta version. Validation (how's that coming, BTW?;-) will eventually
give some hints to the "end user", but it probably would not have caught
the JFK blunder either.
Parts look more like alpha than like beta to me.
Considering Microsoft sells beta-stage software as "stable", the borders
are kinda fluent there :-)
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.
A problem with a bazaar is that the products sold might not conform to
the norms that current society holds.
It's not like the reviewers would come in from another reality. IMHO,
many Wikipedians would qualify. The point is that there would be a
higher standard of quality; people who import substandard articles would
soon be excluded. The main rule would be along the lines "Import *only*
if you *know* this article is good".
Magnus