Ray Saintonge wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be asking people to rate.
I generally agree with your comments, although this one strikes me as backwards. I see ratings as a way of determining whether an article is in fact stable. If an article must first be judged stable what would be the mechanism for making that decision?
I mostly agree with this view, but I see them as somewhat interrelated. If we have some good ratings on at least a few recent versions, it'll be easier to figure out how stable it is. For example, if I know version [x] is good, and someone makes a minor edit that just fixes a typo, then I know that version [x+1] is also good. What we really want are versions that are both stable *and* relatively good, with some indication to the end-user of how good it is (perhaps on a range)---making versions stable in the trivial sense is easy by just protecting the page.
-Mark