My take on this whole issue is that there *will* be a stable version of
Wikipedia, because there is demand for such a thing. When my mom reads
articles, she doesn't want them to sometimes be in the middle of an edit
war, or sometimes have been vandalized, and so on. As Wikipedia
currently is, on average it has great information, but at any given
time, any given article could be completely crap, even if it was great
10 minutes ago. Sure, those of us who know what we're doing can look
through the edit history and pull out a good version, but most people
aren't going to want to or know how to do this.
So basically I think if we don't do it ourselves, somebody else will
start sifting out "good articles" from Wikipedia. I think we can do a
better job of it though, and keep the results under the Wikipedia name.
I also don't really see what the worries with elitism and especially
with the FDL are. I see this exactly as most open source software
development -- you have a CVS branch that can be updated at any time,
and periodic releases of "known good" versions. The attributions and
such are of course not going to be removed (I wouldn't think).
I think perhaps some of the problem might be that people are advocating
(or think other are advocating) a more formalized process along the
lines of Nupedia. I don't think that would be a good idea -- choosing
"known good" versions of articles should IMO by done by consensus, and
we shouldn't require any formal credentials to do so (though hopefully
people with such credentials will be among the people who make comments
in the attempt to reach a consensus). But I do think some process by
which a particular version of an article can be nominated as good, and
then added to the "good" distribution if there are no objections, is a
good idea.
This could all be done on the Wiki, but if the stable distribution is to
be anything but a tiny subset of Wikipedia, I think some more software
would be necessary. Some automated method by which the software keeps
track of submissions and comments would be helpful. One possible method
-- anyone can nominate a particular version of an article, and anyone
can post replies to the nomination that are tagged either "support" or
"oppose" (or "neutral"). Any nomination with no "oppose"
comments
within some certain period of time is automatically added to the stable
version; the ones with opposing comments are dealt with more manually in
the usual wiki way, added if it's been determined a consensus has been
reached, or the nomination withdrawn if a consensus against is reached.
Of course this all requires someone with time and interest in coding up
some more software. But I think that's necessary -- the "Brillian
Prose" manual method doesn't really scale well, and will never I don't
think end up successfully scaling up to, say, keeping track of 25,000
articles.
-Mark