--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I can imagine at least one scenario that would lead to a bit of a fork, although whether it's a bad thing is not clear:
Imagine that we have experts of some sort working on an article. They hash out between them and the others editing an article something reasonably neutral, and it becomes the "stable" version. A few months later, they come back, and the article has been editing by 500 people in the meantime and become mostly a mess. They decide to take a few of the good facts and improvements from the new version and "backport" them to the previous stable version rather than dealing with the mess of the development version, because frankly the last stable version was better (except for the few facts that were duly incorporated). That'd be a fork of sorts, I suppose.
If an article had drifted into becoming an utter mess, then doing exactly as you state would be a *good thing* since it improves the article (the amount of backporting is the key issue; better efforts to do that will result in less of a chance for conflict).
But my point is that all the editing would still be on just one Wikipedia version. The *only* time this would be different would be for final minor formating changes needed for print; most of which could be automated:
Such as changing links to articles that are contained in the print version to have (See: for-bar) at the end of the sentence the term is in and changing links to articles *not* in the print version to plain text. Moving/removing tables and images would also have to be done for print.
-- Daniel
_______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com