On 3/21/07, Sheldon Rampton sheldon@prwatch.org wrote:
One way to have the best of both worlds would be to have a public version of Wikipedia's watchlists feature, with a couple of modifications. Since this feature doesn't currently exist, I'll call it "approval lists" for lack of a better name.
Hmm, I actually like this idea. You can imagine seeing a summary like this for an article:
Current version (28 Feb 2007) Approved by J Smith, Professor of Linguistics, University of Melbourne (5 Jan 2007) Approved by R Jones, author (18 Nov 2006) Approved by J Smith, Professor of Linguistics, University of Melbourne (8 Jun 2006) ...
With a bit of effort and organisation, it would be possible to define groups of approvers who share some common standards on how good an article should be. Then it would be possible to extract a subset of the encyclopaedia that met the minimum standards of any contributor from that group.
We would probably want to expand on "approved" and make it "rated", possibly in several dimensions, like "A for completeness, B for accuracy".
Steve