On 3/13/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/13/07, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
People don't _seriously link_ about Wikipedia's reliability any more than they think about the reliability of their newspaper.
At least with the newspaper, there's no chance that, depending when you choose to open it, you will see "BLOW ME" in big red letters instead of the story you were expecting to read.
You've never read the local free paper in Rockingham, I'll bet.
Some good suggestions so far in the discussion, but I can't say that I like the idea of new text being wigglelined. It might be something perfectly fine, in fact it probably is, but it's going to look like a spelling or grammer error to the casual reader.
I'd like to suggest something which I think should work. Whenever an administrator edits an article, that version automatically becomes the "stable" version that an unregistered reader will see. And it won't have "edit" links all over it. Sure, it might have mistakes and it might have POV, but the odds are that if an admin has had even a glance at it, it's probably good.
Readers who have accounts, and are presumably wikisavvy, will see what we have now: the latest version, able to be edited. Readers without accounts will have an extra button they have to press before they get to the actual current version that they can edit.
We can make it so that the version a casual reader sees is likely to be a good one, and they can cut and paste it into their grade school homework or professional journalistic article as they please. But they can also get into the "work in progress" version just by clicking an extra button and Wikipedia remains the encyclopaedia anyone may edit.