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

[Jimmy Wales]

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

This is a translation into English of a statement in German which was a
translation of something I said in English.

The bit about this being an "announcement" is, well, something they just
made up from scratch.  I made no particular announcement.   A reporter
asked me the usual sort of question about "how can we trust it if it can
always be changed, maybe it was good but it gets vandalized then, etc."

And I gave my usual sort of answer that we are discussing ways to
identify particular versions of articles as being good and that we won't
ever lock articles permanently, even if we do have a stable branch.

Somehow this was turned into an "announcement" that we are changing
editorial policy and forming a committee to determine which articles to
lock in perpetuity.

I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was
to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)

--Jimbo