Anthony DiPierro (anthonydipierro@hotmail.com) [050807 03:36]:
Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article", "Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for a distribution.
I assume you're talking about rating per article, and not per revision (as the latter would be fairly impossible). In that case, it'd be quite a rough idea indeed.
Nope, per article version. See [[m:Article validation feature]]. (I think "validation" is a misnomer here myself - that was Magnus' name for it, since he wrote the feature.)
Any branching and polishing would be left as late as possible. Think of the Mozilla process, where the alpha, beta and final are branched from the nightlies, slightly polished for a few days (or weeks) and then released. This would provide minimal disruption of and diversion of resources from the live Wikipedia.
If the Mozilla process does this, then presumably its programmers are not supposed to introduce brand new features during the alpha and beta stages of development. I find that rather hard to believe, but maybe Mozilla is a small enough project that it can do such a thing.
It's comparable to OpenOffice or KDE in compilation time. Depends if you call that "small".
Again, I don't know much about Mozilla development, but any major development project on the order of something like Wikipedia is going to have branches off the main trunk which are maintained for long periods of time. This causes some wasted time since things need to be merged and backported, but it's the fastest and most efficient way to produce a high quality product. I'm afraid that "slightly polished for a few days (or weeks)" isn't going to cut it.
The terms I was thinking in were to pull all suitably-rated articles that the distributor is interested in, then polish that lot. Note that this is useful to article quality drives in general - anyone could do this at any time to show up areas that you'd want in an encyclopedia but that need work.
Of course, maybe our only disagreement here is over how long it's going to take to get from the point of the fork to the point where the branch is no longer maintained. In my opinion a few weeks isn't going to be anywhere near enough time to fix all the inaccuracies.
The presumption is that the sufficiently highly rated stuff will be of good quality anyway. If it isn't, it's material for an article improvement drive.
- d.