How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
c) When a page with milestone(s) on it was displayed, _you would still see and edit the latest version,_ but a not-too-conspicuous indicator would appear to show that there was a milestone and clicking on it would display the milestone.
d) NPOV and such notices could contain a suggestion that you might want to read the latest milestone.
This would change the current situation minimally--newcomers would still see and edit the latest page regardless of whether there were "milestones." In situations where there was a serious "months-after" effect, it would be easy to revert to the last milestone and then hash things out via the usual edit wars... I can imagine a "Votes for Reversion to Milestone" conference.
In other words, once a milestone is marked, don't lock it or obviously prefer it--just make it available.
The assumption is that in the vast majority of cases, once a milestone is reached, further edits would still be progressive improvements.
In other words, just provide a way of putting bookmarks into the existing "history" file and a tab which, instead of bringing up the whole history, brings up the latest milestone.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote
How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
Well, the wiki way is more like: make Milestone a category; allow anyone to add, therefore, but have a convention that no one awards their own edit a milestone, and that anyone adding a Milestone category should comment it in the edit, so it's clear in the history. And one can have Milestone2, etc. This is one form of editable page ratings.
And yes, I suppose it would be good to have the chance to see a filtered page history, with just those edits that affected milestones.
Charles
At 11:32 AM 10/12/2004 +0100, Charles Matthews wrote:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote
How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
Well, the wiki way is more like: make Milestone a category; allow anyone to add, therefore, but have a convention that no one awards their own edit a milestone, and that anyone adding a Milestone category should comment it in the edit, so it's clear in the history. And one can have Milestone2, etc. This is one form of editable page ratings.
How does one put a category tag on a specific _version_ of an article? I think what's being discussed is sufficiently different from the existing category system that we should call it something different to avoid confusion.
Other than that, since this proposal exactly matches the one I made a day or two back I support it entirely. :)
On 10/12/04 6:01 AM, "Daniel P.B.Smith" dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism:
a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone."
b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
Instead of restricting the power to sysops, everyone (registered) should be able to vote, with clear criteria. You'd get something like the recommended diaries at Daily Kos.
*Or* the process of becoming a sysop should become automated so that most regular users are sysops.
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
How about providing this minimal amount of mechanism: a) A way of marking a particular edit as a "milestone." b) The ability to mark an edit as a milestone would be suitably restricted to people, probably sysops, who would agree to be governed by discussion, consensus, policy, etc. TBD.
a) This actually ties in with our previous discussions on this list about a review process to sift out articles for Wikipedia 1.0.
b) There must be a way to do this within the Wiki process, rather than bringing in an editorial committee by another name. I would suggest we start with the review process wide open and only narrow it as needed.
I'm not saying the Wiki process must be a magical way to get brilliance. What I do think is that a reviewing process that lets the wiki do the work is much more likely to work well within the project and get buy-in from the editors.
Obvious problems spring to mind, e.g. vote spamming. (Imagine weblogs telling people to come and vote for THIS version of [[George W. Bush]] or [[John Kerry]] or [[Azerbaijan]] or [[Linux]].) But, keeping possible problems in mind, I suspect it would be better to *let the problems happen*, then do things to solve them *if* they really turn out that bad.
Magnus implemented a review voting procedure on test.wikipedia.org, if people want to see how such a thing might look to an editor. He calls it 'validate', but we can work out a suitable name as needed:
http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=validate%C3...
Mind you, there's a lot to be said for Andrew Lih's words:
Why not have milestones done the usual wiki way? Try consensus first, then do voting. No fancy mechanisms or sysop only policies.
- d.