Anthony wrote:
On 9/9/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Stable versions doesn't have to do anything visible if the default is for people to see the most recent version rather than the one marked stable. Enable it, let people noodle around figuring out the procedures for what to mark, and if after a while the resulting version marking looks good maybe then make it the default anon view.
The thing is, if stable versions don't have to do anything visible, then the developers don't have to implement anything in the first place. People can just stick a note on the talk page for an article saying "I declare [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hey_Ya%21&oldid=156732871 version 156732871] to be stable" and other people can say "*I agree" or "*what are you high?" or whatever.
But once this has been tried, assuming enough people actually follow this procedure to give meaningful results, what then? The software doesn't "understand" what those links in the talk pages mean so there's nowhere to go in terms of expanding Wikipedia's functionality based on it. You need software to be able to do things like have a "show stable version first" as a user preference, or to create a stable-version-only database dump.
And besides, the basic point of my complaint is that after years of people talking about stable versions absolutely _nothing_ has been implemented, not even a crude software-free hack to get things started. Not even the Featured Article talk page templates link to specific versions.