Bryan Derksen wrote:
At 08:34 AM 10/12/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote
The version that gets picked as the "milestone" won't always
_remain_ the
milestone.
Well OK. We have 'featured articles' and may wish to revisit those too, I suppose. But the main point is that WP pages should constantly and obviously be 'open for business', not subject to hurdles for editors.
Which would be the default view of things under the system I proposed. The current "working" version is the first thing people see, and unless they specifically go out of their way to click on the "view last milestone" link in the sidebar it'll be the only version they see.
I have no problem with a stable version (The name "milestone" is not my favorite.) as long as there continues to be an editable version. The editable version in such circumstances could have a note at the beginning for the benefit of the unwary visitor.
The text below has been subject to heated differences of opinion, for a less controversial version see [[.../stable]].
There remains the question of how a stable version would be decided. One important factor should be the participation of a representative from each major POV on the matter.
IMO this is the key for rolling out and testing any new feature on Wikipedia without causing a major uproar; it should be possible for people who don't care about the feature to just ignore it and continue to use Wikipedia as they always have, with it behaving in the same way it always did. Templates violated this somewhat since it's not obvious how to edit them when you stumble upon one in an article, but categories fit it well since one can simply ignore them and they make no difference. TeX and table wikimarkup was sort of midway between those, since they required a bit of learning to use properly but one could still do those things the "old way" instead. Can't think of any other recent major additions to Wikipedia offhand, I'm probably missing a few.
If a person is not working on mathematics related material he does not need to concern himself with the needed TeX markup. Normal text base material is not affected at all. The templates seem to attract those people who believe that there is a technological solution for everything, and who often fail to heed the human side of editing.
Ec