Been reading the threads about a stable 1.0 etc, and they are interesting. Here is my 2 pageclicks worth. I apologise up front if this has been bashed out before, in which case, ignore me :)
Wiki's are about letting anyone contribute, in anyway they want. Anyone should be able to review - same way anyone can create, add, amend, edit, categorize, summarise or convert between british and american spellings ;)
It is *your* opinion of the reviewer's reputation that seems to matter more. I might be happy with the most recent edit, my mum may want some approval from a well known (commercial?) brand she can trust. My friend in research would only accept articles that have been peer reviewed by at least two other subject aware academics. Having said I'd be happy with the most recent edits, I might actually want something more authoritative in some cases.
For instance, if I put my personal mark of approval on these two articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=The_A-Team&oldid=5836501 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&a...
... these (as far as I can tell) will never change [1]. You probably don't care - you don't know me from adam. Still, my mum might use my list.
I need a way to list articles I have reviewed (and which versions). A watchlist with added version numbers? A Reviewlist? Only I can amend my watchlist, so this isn't a big leap forward.
You need a way to read (but not edit) my reviewlist. A list of all the pages I have reviewed would be a start. Going further, and assuming I had reviewed enough, have the software only show links to articles on the reviewlist of your reviewer of choice. Or the reviewers of your choosing.
There is a limit to how much one person can review, but *you* can choose to trust many people. Once you've seen articles reviewed by your own list of reviewers, add the second degree reviewers. Friends of friends.
m.
ps. reputation systems. basis for trust, eg amazon, ebay, etc. reviews. There is a connection here me thinks. Why do people buy from complete strangers on ebay who they've never met? If I've sold a lot of stuff, and 99% of people where happy, are you any more likely to trust me as a seller? What if seller becomes reviewer, and buyer is the reader and we are trading in words?
[1] The only minor issue being I cannot find a way to get this style of perma-link for the most recent version.
Minty-
There is a limit to how much one person can review, but *you* can choose to trust many people. Once you've seen articles reviewed by your own list of reviewers, add the second degree reviewers. Friends of friends.
This is a good model for a system where we want many different versions to coexist, i.e. where we agree that there is not one "good" version", but everyone might have their own preference of what constitutes a good one. In Wikipedia terms, Robert Brookes might flag his POV version of the circumcision article, for example. It certainly would be a good way to end many edit wars as people would start maintaining their preferred branches in parallel, not caring whether they are instantly reverted or not. The fight over the current "top" version would become less dramatic.
I predict that such trust systems will evolve outside Wikipedia and will develop Wikipedia content into versions written from a shared POV of an individual community. To some extent, this is already happening (Disinfopedia etc.).
If we establish trust-based versioning within Wikipedia, I believe it means that we essentially abandon our belief that we can increasingly approach a single article written from the neutral point of view. People have been pushing separate branches already for a few controversial articles; if we give them the tools to do so, this is almost inevitable, in my opinion.
Humans are social creatures. When they feel very strongly about something, they seek out others who agree with them - just browse the "Wikipedians" pages on Meta. Ironically, I believe that if we want to maintain the NPOV principle, we have to sabotage that natural instinct to some degree. We have to focus on the one thing that connects us all, the desire to build a great, neutral encyclopedia, and we have to be able to repress any revulsion we feel at the stupid ideas of others.
My preferred approach is one where the peer review process actually results in increased work on the article, where disagreements are resolved not by flagging your preferred version, but by backing up your opinion with citations for any individual statement of fact that is in dispute.
On the Featured Article Candidates page, we have introduced the principle of "actionability". If an objection is not actionable, it can be ignored. This principle needs to be developed further and permeate all of Wikipedia, so that POV partisans cannot easily sabotage discussions.
Together with an improved discussion system that encourages refactoring the results of discussions into policy pages, I believe we can deal with many of the same problems that keep coming up again and again, like explicit content or balance in controversial articles.
Regards,
Erik