At 03:14 PM 10/11/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote
Does that address your concerns about stasis?
Isn't it basically the case that the moment when the current WP community starts taking the attitude that it knows better than prospective newcomers is also going to be the moment when WP stops being hot, and looks more like a mutual admiration society/
The version that gets picked as the "milestone" won't always _remain_ the milestone. Eventually the selection mechanism (still undefined - it could very well include some voting system that allows oldsters and newcomers alike to participate in it) will revisit the article and if there's been any improvement the current version will become the _new_ milestone. And under the approach I suggested in the email you're responding to, all of this would be going on invisibly behind the scenes so people would still be defaulting to the current "working" version when they visit that article.
There are already aspects of Wikipedia operation where the current WP community takes the attitude that it knows better than prospective newcomers - things like the voting process for admin status (one needs a certain number of edits in one's history to plausibly succeed), the Arbitration Committee, etc. None of these strike me as particularly egregious, and I don't think a low-key method of marking "milestones" is going to be worse than that. Just make it clear that the process is an ongoing one, and that good new edits will ultimately be included in a milestone version at some point.