Andrew Gray wrote:
On 20/03/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm. If someone told me that any change I made to Wikipedia would have to be "approved" by someone, or that the change would be somehow "provisional" or "second-rate', I would be less motivated to work on it.
Mmm. Motivation is likely to decrease as the approval process gets backlogged, and I'd be impressed at a process which can (to pick numbers out of the air) re-approve a couple of hundred thousand articles on a weekly, or even monthly, basis.
It's a bit like an "Articles for cleanup" feature. Things are put into the bin faster than they are taken out. For some it makes deletionism an attractive option. When a process becomes backlogged it is evidently not scaling well.
As an aside, this is a perfect project for an "ongoing fork". Every article on StablePedia is a static copy of a past Wikipedia article, perhaps slightly tidied by SP editors and reviewers; old revisions aren't displayed, and people are pointed back to Wikipedia to work on the ongoing draft. When you want to update, you just dump the old one, grab a new copy, approve and post on StablePedia - GFDL compliance is simple enough, and this means you can display your "approval infrastructure" nice and cleanly without conflicting with the live project. There's no conceptual reason the Foundation couldn't host both, either, and it might even be beneficial to do so as a trial balloon.
I have no problem with others creating forks into more specialized Pedias either. I'm sure we would also be happy to share our vandals with them. :-) For us we would still need to maintain a fluidity between the projects. I would leave it to the techies to comment on which would work better on that level.
(The downside is that it's much less high-profile... but the *upside* is that it might actually happen. Major changes to the publishing structure of enwp proper, especially a credentialled editorial-control system, are rather unlikely to ever actually get in place...)
Agreed. It's one of those ideas that only succeeds in uncovering new problems.
Ec