Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com>
wrote:
Last time I ventured my two cents concerning the
print Wikipedia, the
response I got led me to conlcude that there was no support for forking
Wikipedia even in the slightest to make the content more acceptible -- which
is what any approval board would end up doing. Then the project seemed to go
into hibernation. Then it seemed that a group was working on it. Now it
appears we are back to discussing what should be done.
What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at *all* -
the only thing that will be done is selecting one version of an article that is
approved in some way. Any future approved version would be based on the
development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia article which would be in
perpetual development), not the last stable version.
If we adopt a formal approval system, the idea that all future approved
versions will be based on development versions, rather than the last
approved "stable" version, sounds naively idealistic to me. Even without
an approval system, this is already not the case on some of our more
contentious articles. When changes are not agreed on quickly, one side
or the other, and sometimes both, may adopt the tactic of reverting back
to an earlier version of which it "approves". However, since the sides
generally do not approve of the same version, the dispute continues and
often results in a revert war.
Any system that marks a particular revision as "approved" or "stable"
will inherently increase the temptation to blindly revert changes back
to the "stable" revision, instead of trying to work with those changes
and improve the article. This is already a problem in some places and
among some editors (no names, this is not an invitation for
finger-pointing). If we want to implement a system that lets people flag
specific article revisions, let's at least be aware of the possible
downsides to this as well.
--Michael Snow