[Wikipedia-l] Re: Stable versions policy

Tue Dec 27 17:56:31 UTC 2005

Amaurea wrote:
<snip Nupedia comparison>

>
>By marking a version of an article as stable, and presenting that
>version to normal visitors, we are breaking down the coupling between
>the number of readers and the number of editors. 
>
No. This *might* happen only if the stable version becomes the default
for anons. Then again, it might not.

When Nupedia didn't live up to its expectations, Wikipedia was started.
It was an experiment, and it worked, so we kept it.

/That/ is the spirit of the project. If something is not right, try
something to fix it. If it works, greak, keep it; if it does not work,
so what? Anyone remember the "Nupedia Chalkboard"? It was a wiki to
initiate articles for Nupedia. It is not around anymore.

Something is wrong in wikipedia country, not with creating articles, but
with being an encyclopedia. With provding *reasonably reliable*
information to people. People who don't know wikipedia, and probably
don't really care about how the article they are reading came into
being. They want it to be correct and complete, period.

>The whole point of a
>wiki, and the key behind Wikipedia's incredible growth, is that every
>reader is an editor, and in light of that it isn't a good idea to
>create seperate views of an article for readers and editors. Any
>reader reading the stable version instead of the current version will
>be one less potential editor to improve the current version. 
>
I don't know if you've seen my test page, but just below the title,
there's a line "This is the stable version. The current working version
is [[here]]".

>One could
>hope that people who find faults in the stable version would go to the
>draft version to implement improvements there, but simply saying that
>a version is stable will discourage edits, and people who still want
>to make edits will be further discouraged by those edits not being
>seen by the main public, but hidden away in some draft version of the
>article. Thus, this will discourage positive edits for the same reason
>it will discourage vandalism: It becomes slightly harder to edit,
>
No. Throw a switch in your user settings, and the haunting will go away ;-)
(Note that this is not implemented yet in my version; neither is showing
the stable version by default.)

> and
>more importantly, the results aren't immediatly visible on the main
>version of the article (the one most people read).
>  
>
So?

>Regarding vandalism and bad pages, the wiki answer to these is that we
>have lots of people to fix those problems for the same reason the
>poblems are there. There will be more vandalism the bigger Wikipedia
>grows, but so will the number of people who can spot and fix that
>vandalism, for the same reason. 
>
The real problem isn't outright vandalism. The problem is the
Steigentaler incident type. Wrong information, inserted by accident or
by purpose. A stable version can prevent this. The current system has
shown it can't, not in all cases.

>This is inherently scalable, so there
>should be no need for any change the way we deal with this just
>because the wiki has reached a given size. Wikipedia is by no means
>finished. There are still millions of articles waiting to be created,
>fleshed out and polished, and many already existing articles that need
>to be improved. We should therefore continue to make our readers edit
>our articles. Not because the wiki process is sacred in itself, but
>because it has proven to be the fastest way to create an encyclopedia.
>  
>
We already *have* created an encyclopedia. Now our focus has to shift
towards /being/ an encyclopedia. Our ways have to change accordingly.

Magnus