[WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

[Anthony DiPierro]

>I am worried about Jimbo's announcement about locking some articles. See
>http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/20050805-1259-media-wikipedia.html

"'There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the 
pages whose quality is undisputed,' he said."

The way I read this, there would be a stable version and a current version, 
much like the linux kernel or just about any large bit of source code.  If 
that's what he meant, it sounds like a good idea.

Of course, it worries me if this quote is accurate, because it makes it 
sound like he plans on imposing this idea upon the community.  We all know 
how long it takes to implement something this major by any means other than 
edict.

>Simply freezing content seems rather unwiki, but here
>"lock" is just a misnomer for "extended protection,"
>allowing sysops only to edit them.

Both are incredibly "unwiki", the whole basis of a wiki is that anyone can 
directly edit it, not just sysops, and not just by proposing edits and 
hoping one of the editors implements them.  But the goal of Wikipedia is to 
be a free encyclopedia, not a wiki.  Wiki is just a means to that end.

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