On 3/13/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/13/07, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006(a)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.
--
Peter in Canberra