[Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

Wed Dec 21 23:42:51 UTC 2005

>
> 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*!

Well, someone will come and will, anyway.

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.

Magnus, this is a big shift, you must understand. It is not a minor editing
change. The point is, as you said above, that we're changing our wiki nature
to sort of become half-wiki. With stable versions, particularly if shown as
default, Wikipedia will become a static encyclopedia, with the option to
then edit articles as a secondary structure. Wikipedia is a wiki and should
always stay a wiki. Any systematic form of article protection/anti-wiki
structures outside of temporary bans and stuff like that is a major shift
and IMO goes against the principles of wiki.

Secondly, we really need to have widespread community consensus on this.
It's great to see that so many people are giving their opinions here. I
don't know what the plan is to lauch stable versions - whether they will
simply be included in the new MediaWiki, but I think before it's introduced,
people need to really be aware of this shift.

Picking one example, I think [[en:Geroge W. Bush]] has been protected
> since before the last election, which was a year ago. This is due to
> repeated vandalism. There are several more, though. This could be fixed
> through stable versions.

Well, George Bush isn't protected actually. I mean, maybe it's protected 25%
of the time due to vandalism, but that's only because it goes through
patterns of protected-unprotected-protected, etc. It's not systematically,
permanently protected. Yes, this could be fixed for stable versions, but
only at the cost of effectively locking down the main versions of
potentially more than 800,000 articles!

Ronline