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. :-(
And speaking from experience as an editor, a lot of my edits are "impulse" ones made when I see an obviously erroneous statement or wrong formatting or spelling error, or when I see something obvious I can quickly add to an article. I'm sure a lot of other edits, especially those by anons, are made this way. If I had to take one extra step to view the latest version of an article (which I'm sure would be the only editable one), as I'm sure all anons would be forced to under the proposed Citizendium-ish idea, my number of impulse edits would probably be zero.
Absolutely. I'm sure we've all made minor corrections to articles we would not otherwise edit. That is an important element in the dynamism of the site. It becomes frustrating when the error is buried in a protected template. Sure we can always bring it to the attention of an admin, but who wants to enter into complicated discussions and explanations just to have a single letter changed in a spelling error. We can't both use the mantra "sofixit", and make that fix inordinately complicated or even impossible.
Ec