On 20/03/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
John Lee wrote:
Yes, I was just about to sugges a similar system myself. An ongoing fork is a much better solution than making the approved version the sole public one. Speaking from personal experience as a webmaster, simply making users take one more step to edit an article (i.e. clicking on "view draft article", instead of being able to go direct to editing) can drastically reduce (I'd say halve wouldn't be unreasonable) the number of users who take the desired action.
Probably so. While I still support the idea of an approved version that counterracts the most egregious silliness, I would prefer something far more sophisticated that takes into account a number of factors in evaluating an article. The result could be a single number (or block of numbers that measure different criteria). It would be a statistical accumulation of individual ratings applied by many people, and would need to take into account subsequent unreviewed edits. It would need to be sufficiently robust to not be derailed by the eccentric opinions of a single user.
Since I do not have the programming skills to implement this I can only dream. :-(
Perhaps we're thinking about this the wrong way around. We should aim to approve versions of the article in the history as factually accurate, not change our current processes for the approval of live articles. To ensure our continued growth we need to keep editing as simple as possible.
By allowing particular users to approve versions of articles in their article history (maybe even rating them on a number of scales: factual accuracy, presentation, breadth of coverage), we generate a trustable Wikipedia (users could change their preferences to always seeing the newest approved version of any article they search for, rather than seeing the live version) while retaining our dynamism.
This could mean that any article could have several approved versions at once: some of the approved versions would make claim to factual accuracy (if the approver went through the effort of verifying everything), some would make the claim to simply being vandalism-free. Users could alter their viewing preferences according to how trustable they need the information to be.