[Wikipedia-l] road to stability, some clarifications

Wed Dec 7 09:20:00 UTC 2005

Dear all
although I am really glad that i spurred such a lifely discussion over 
"stability" matters, let me make a few remarks as to what I think is 
taking the wrong direction.

First of all, I never proposed a filtered view on WP for the general 
public. There are deficiences, vandalisms and all in it and I can see 
simply no way to come up with a stable version however you might define 
that out of the blue at this stage. Some of your comments indicated that 
there should be editing in the background of the article that should 
somehow be promoted to the front - given the changes have reached a 
qualitatively satisfying level. Frankly, I do NOT believe in such a 
method which would require splitting the community into less and more 
equal editors.

On the contrary, my proposal was and still is: Leave the view on the 
data alone, do not try to nominated a board of editor's editors but 
RAISE the threshold for offhanded edits by absolutely requiring a 
minimum of reference / source information besides the comment line. This 
information should be as immutable as the comment line and not included 
in the article ("==References=="). This should make it successively 
harder and harder for matured articles to insert contradicting 
information (I am not mentioning confusing information due to the 
editor's lack to express him/herself!)  So far nobody has convinced me 
of the contrary.

The question remains what we should mean by "matured" and which 
indicators we should use for quantifying maturity of an article. The raw 
number of edits is completely out of question if the length of the edit 
(insertions/deletions/modifications) is not taken into account for 
weighting them - effectively making the weight of the edit proportional 
to something like the Mahalanobis or the edit-distance known from 
bioinformatics.
Please, folks, read again carefully and try to get away from "filtered 
view" phantasies. Let's not revolutionize WP. Let's simply raise the 
minimal editing standards just a wee little bit - which would be 
revolutionary enough - for my taste.
Kai (kku)