--- Mark Richards marich712000@yahoo.com wrote:
What makes you think either that the current system is creating mediocrity, or that the proposed review board would be better? It seems that what is being proposed is removing the value added of an open content encyclopedia, and would be damaging for that reason.
One thing the current EB FUD was right about is that sometimes good articles are edited into becoming worse articles.
How would having a review board remove any added value? If anything, their input and selection is by definition added value. No part of article development or creation would need to change. There would just be a final check by a review board before a particular version of an article is labeled as 1.0. The article would *not* be protected from editing but a static version of the 1.0 version would be available for those people who wanted it (a diff could be used to see what changes have been made to the live version). All development would be directed toward the live version.
Discounting what critics have to say and continuing to maintain that everything is perfectly fine as-is, is just sticking your head in the sand.
A common criticism about Wikipedia is that there is no easy way to find out if the article you are reading can be trusted at all.
Versioning will help that.
-- mav
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