[Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

Thu Dec 22 20:30:06 UTC 2005

Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Instead of thinking of (the English) Wikipedia as a basket of 
> 850,000 articles in their current version, we can think of it as a 
> basket of X million article-versions.
>    Every
> article-version in this collection of X million is free under
> GFDL, and can be used as the basis for new article-versions.
> Anybody can add new article-versions to the collection.

Oh, I *like* that.

> Currently Wikipedia works under the assumption that the latest 
> version of any article is the best one, and the only one that 
> should be linked from other articles, shown to the public and 
> indexed by search engines.  It is important that we realize that 
> this *is* an assumption, it does represent a design choice, and 
> not necessarily the optimal one.
> If I'm compiling a Wikireader or a similar subset of articles, I 
> might pick my article-versions under very different assumptions.

I agree.

> 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.

Indeed!

- d.