On Tuesday 25 January 2005 03:09, Christopher Mahan wrote:
I'm pissed, and I want to rant. (you've been warned)
I understand you completely; the problem in Wikipedia is that authors start writing without discussing, planning and organising their efforts. In my wiki projects I will try to follow a different approach, and I believe Wikipedia should consider a change in its attitudes. Here is my design: 1. The wiki is just a place to store articles. Discussions in the wiki are prohibited. 2. The Talk: pages are renamed Test: pages and all the writing and collaborative writing happens there. 3. Non-Test pages (i.e. the real articles) are protected and only admins can edit them. 4. The authors are using a mailing list, a phpBB forum and a special collaboration platform to discuss and decide how to write the article. An example of a very good collaboration platform is phpCollab. 5. There are Article Maintainers who check for copyright violations and check the references, et cetera. 6. Every article is developed in a software-like fashion, i.e. there are versions and when the mains (maintainers) approve an article it will be checked by the admins. The admins then publish the article in a non-Test page (i.e. the main namespace) and give to it a unique version number such as 1.4.
You can learn more about this design at http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Help:Editing_process
Some additional info about versions exists at http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Help:Article_versions