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

Wed Dec 7 14:33:18 UTC 2005

--- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> To give maximum choice, I have just written a new MediaWiki extension
> which allows for *one* revision of an article to be declared "stable".

Yay! You rock! :)

> A select group of users can declare an article version as "stable". In
> the default setup, the "select group" is everyone, but that would have
> to be tightly restricted in an live setup. For this purpose, I propose
> the creation of a new user group, like buerocrats and sysops, called
> "prozacs" - after all, they are supposed to stabelize the wiki ;-)
> 
.
> 
> There is a problem with templates; even a stable version will use new
> templates. I do not have a neat soultion for that, except generally
> limiting write access to templates. However, misinformation through a
> template will be hard to achieve anyway, compared to directly editing
> article; also, template changes will be noticed rather quickly.

Why not just copy the source HTML of a reference stable revision at the time of marking and serve
that? That way whatever was in the template at the time of the snapshot will be displayed as the
stable HTML copy. 

> This complements the validation feature and the external "import-wiki".
> Now all the community has to do is chose. Simple, eh? ;-)

Yep. The article validation feature could eventually be used to automatically feed a list of top
reviewed article versions. Those with the ability to mark revisions as stable would use that list
to select stable versions. Policies on each wiki would dictate the standards that the
stable-making "prozacs" would need to follow.

Did I mention yet, that YOU ROCK! :)

-- mav

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