At 09:55 PM 10/10/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:
Matthew Lar> > I also think the idea of having a stable locked version is good (I
think I posted the idea in another thread), as it stops disruption.
Well, then you don't have a wiki. You have one of those other things, where you need some permission to edit. In fact this is exactly the suggestion that bright people who don't know the wiki way always will come up with, in their first five minutes of thinking about how to make it work.
Well, I've been an editor here on Wikipedia practically since it started and this is an idea I've come up with a lot too, so don't dismiss it so lightly. I think it bears some deeper consideration. How about the following variant on the idea, for example:
The default page that everyone first sees when they go to an article is the most up-to-date "working" version, just like what we see when we go to an article currently. Editing it, viewing its history, all of that would remain exactly the same. The difference would be that tucked away in the sidebar or at the top of the page would be a link that says "view most recent stable version". This would take the reader to the most recent version that's been tagged by whatever form of "editorial staff" or "approval rating" system we eventually come up with (to be worked out separately). Following any links from that "stable" version (including the edit link) would take one right back to the "working" version of whatever page is linked to, so it would be impossible to ignore the work in progress.
Does that address your concerns about stasis? The only remaining issue I can think of is ensuring that the "stable" version isn't considered so great that people keep mindlessly reverting to it when they shouldn't, and that's similar enough to the existing issue of article reversion that I suspect it wouldn't take a lot of policy work to handle it.