[Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

Thu Dec 22 15:30:46 UTC 2005

On 12/22/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> I'm surprised that Wikipedia mirrors such as Answers.com don't
> work more like Wikireaders, where a human editor picks useful
> article-versions and leaves the stubs unmirrored.  The added value
> from such an "editor's choice" would be a perfectly valid business
> model.
>

You'd have to spend a whole lot of money to get human editors to pick
the "useful articles".  It might pay off in the really long term, but
it'd require a huge investment.  And due to the GFDL some other
company could just come along and take the results of that huge
investment and drive you out of business anyway.  I'm not at all
surprised no one is doing it.

It's enough of a value add to present a page with results from
multiple different sources, organized without all the editing tools
and other extraneous things useful only for editing.  It's enough of a
filter to just leave out article versions which were reverted within 5
minutes (or some other determined time period).  Until recently the
mirrors tended to perform faster as well.

When I want to read Wikipedia, I go to the mirrors, not to
wikipedia.org.  Wikipedia just doesn't do a very good job of
distributing its product, and it wastes millions of dollars of
donation money trying.

This is not to knock the Wikipedia, which does a great job of
producing articles.  I don't think you'll ever be able to cater to
readers and editors on the same site though (although to some extent
that comes down to a semantics question of what would be considered
"the same site").

Anthony