[Wikipedia-l] Re: Stable versions policy

Thu Dec 29 02:46:21 UTC 2005

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>So showing stable versions by default will *kill* one of the best aspects of Wikipedia; its
>ability to record history as it happens. It will also encourage needless forking of articles with
>stable versions whenever its subject is in the news. Not because doing that is best for covering
>the subject, but *only* to be able to report on the current events (no stable version = live
>version is displayed). 
>  
>
How would marking a revision as stable cause a fork of an article when 
the subject comes up in the news? Editing would still be done from the 
latest revision.

For that matter, it should be standard practice to unflag the stable 
version if current events make it too obsolete. And if there is no 
stable version (for most of our articles at present, there shouldn't 
be), then everyone gets the editable version by default regardless.

>For these reasons and others, I am **EXTREMELY** against hiding the live version behind stable
>ones on Wikipedia. If that is what they want, then there will be plenty of mirrors that will only
>display stable versions of our articles. Or they could simply choose to view stable versions by
>default; either by clicking on a 'View stable version of this article' link for selected articles
>or logging in and setting their preferences for that. 
>  
>
Trying to twist the arms of casual readers into doing any of this is a 
fool's errand. If they're on Wikipedia already, they're not going to do 
the work to figure out which sites mirror our stable versions (as 
opposed to outdated unstable versions) and navigate to those sites. And 
using low-quality content to try and lure people to sign in for the 
better stuff is one of the mistakes that turned AOL into the butt of so 
many jokes.

--Michael Snow