Mav typed: "But a stable distribution vetted by area I love this circular trend -- communism degrades into totalitarianism and abuse of power -- Then comes capitalist revolution and a little later, bourgeois attitude and abuse of wealth, then until socialist revolution takes over again. Consider this trend here -- Nupedia was elitist and produced nada. The Wikipedia was a revolution that became the flagship wiki on the web. Democratize everything! Limit no user! Spam? Vandalism? Well handle it! Then came complaints and calls for push-button corrections -- overstressed people quit. ( F($&) p(#*(# -- as George Carlin would say) Then comes again the old idea of making a New Nupedia again -- control everything! -- show us your credentials! Lets sell textbooks! What a load!-* -S- We can use Erik's idea for adding neat features to the Brilliant prose page as a start. Then that page can act as a queue for articles that Nupedia can take-up and then put through a simplified Nupedia polishing process by area experts. The Sifter software can be used to make this easy but it is not really needed. But a stable distribution vetted by area experts (at the very least by people with baccalaureate degrees in the subject area) /is/ a very important thing for us to have. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

Am Sonntag, 27. Juli 2003 06:51 schrieb Daniel Mayer: I do not beleive that this is a very good idea. You can do this, of course, the GNU FDL allows it. However, I feel like Wikipedia should be cannibalized that way, sorry. I agree that stable and accepted articles are important to have (for quoting and so on). I do not agree that defining those versions must be done by "people with baccalaureate degrees in the subject area". It would be far more important to get these experts *Writing* instead of editing. I am not in favour of a system where a lot of people drive thousands of articles to a certain (excellent) state, and a few experts get the merits by selecting the articels, making some smaller copyedits and then calling that the "real" encyclopaedia, implicitly stating that the Wikipedia is not serious at all. Uli

Daniel- Well, here's the thing. Our Main Page is protected. Our Main Page links to the Brilliant Prose page, which would also be protected. The Brilliant Prose page would only link to verified revisions of articles. A user can choose this path Main Page->Brilliant prose->Article And they will never see an "unstable" article -- these pages would always be in a reasonable state. It is the same thing as a separate site, but happens entirely within Wikipedia. We might have to streamline the whole process -- turn BP into a directory of pages, make this directory part of the start page, and warn readers that pages linked from pages within that directory may not necessarily be in as good quality. This would not preclude us from also using a category system that contains *all* Wikipedia pages, not just filtered ones. On the other hand, we would retain wikiness and encourage people to also browse and participate in our unstable sections. I think that's a good thing. Of course the BP articles could be taken as they are and copied to another site, but that would not really be very useful. What might be useful, if BP grows into a directory of sorts instead of just a single page, and if there would be lots of articles linked from there, is to publish only these articles on a CD-ROM, in print etc. Regards, Erik