[WikiEN-l] Idea from Citizendium: list of corrections

[Eugene van der Pijll]

David Gerard schreef:
> http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Self-Correction_Policy
> 
> Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and
> full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with
> something like this?

The version history is our corrections list.

It's not workable, I think. It is only viable if corrections are the
exception, something to be ashamed of (and therefore, by showing the
corrections, you show that you are a responsible source). But for
wikis, corrections are fundamental in the evolution of an article;
corrections is what our articles are made of.

The proper place to note that you've corrected something is in the edit
summary; it would be nice to be able to mark an edit as "Major", so that
you could build an automatic correction list, but as long as anyone is
able to edit WP, that will not be possible.

Of course, separate correction lists would be great opportunities for
edit wars. So it could be very entertaining.

At Citizendium, it could work, because they have approved articles. They
can use these correction lists to summarize the changes from one version
to the other. As there are often months between approved versions, this
would not increase the workload too much. Larry Sanger's proposal says
they should be made for all unapproved articles as well, which I'm
very sceptical about.

However, it's a good thing if they would try this. The above is just my
opinion; it would be good if Citizendium could provide us with
experimental results.

Eugene