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.
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.
(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...)
Hmm. I'm not against...but I guess I would have to see it in action.
I think we'd all like to see proposals working :-)