On 30 Sep 2006, at 20:52, Richard Holton wrote:
On 9/30/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
On 30 Sep 2006, at 18:33, Richard Holton wrote:
On 9/30/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
May preference is to use colour. There are many possible ways to do this, but one way would be for sentences to start out light grey, and each independent editor who approves or disapproves turns it darker and either more blue or more red. So dark blue would be strongly supported, dark red would be strongly opposed, and light grey would be not supported or opposed.
Then uncited claims which were "obviously" true would soon gain credibility, but contentious claims would also be obvious.
As has been mentioned, a simple viewing option could turn everything back to normal.
Please, no!
This is the sort of "voting for the truth" that Colbert dubbed "wikiality".
It is not a question of how many people think it's true, or vote for it to be true. It's a question of reliable, verifiable sources.
Yes, we can go wonko about process, or smother articles with reference-love (neither of which is good), but let's not encourage the view that whatever most people believe must be the truth.
There is a difference between voting for the truth and showing which statements have been widely considered.
In what way would such a color-based interface reflect that difference? If there was a widely-accepted but false statement in an article, how would it appear based on this interface? How would such an interface help (or hurt) in a hotly-contested article, like [[Intelligent design]] or [[George W. Bush]]?
I just don't see such an interface contributing anything to the issues it attempts to solve.
Perhaps you could continue to look a little deeper.
A false but widely accepted item would show up as having consensus agreement. A discussion on the talk page by the enlightened few would be expected to change this consensus - possibly including a link to the discussion which included any cites so new people could see how the consensus was reached. This compares to the current system where such a statement sits there without comment.
A false but not widely supported view, on the other hand, would be much more distinct. In the current system, it appears black and indistinguishable to the lay reader from a widely known truth. In the colour system, such an unsupported opinion would appear as pale grey.
Even hotly contested articles contain many facts agreed by all sides. The contested information and the agreed information would be clearly distinguished. This is an area where many cites to support any opinion would be available, so citations on their own would not resolve the differences in the current set up.
So the issues it would resolve are (a) to clarify which areas have few or many opinions (b) to clarify which areas are contentious