Magnus Manske wrote:
Well, if there's a page that is updated regularly,
and you want people
to always see the latest, probably vandalized, version, then *don't set
any version of it as stable*!
Doesn't this defeat one of the main purposes of stable versions, marking
a version of frequently-vandalized articles so that our readers and
mirrors can have some reassurance that what they're looking at isn't a
pack of blatant lies?
I love the idea of stable versions and such, but I really don't think
it's a good idea to have these new features change the default behavior
of Wikipedia significantly. Maybe later after we get some solid data and
experience with how stable versions are turning out we could consider
making them the default view, but for now I think it should be just an
option that can be ignored by those who don't want to deal with it.
The difference between the current state of wikipedia
and wikipedia with
stable versions is this: With the former, readers get a wiki to see;
with the latter, they get an encyclopedia.
But our goal isn't to _show_ an encyclopedia to people, it's to get
people to help us _write_ one. Let
Answers.com worry about showing our
material to people.