Fast Fission wrote,
There was a lot of talk not too long ago about possibilities of protecting certain high-profile articles which are reasonably "good", in order to prevent various forms of content degredation which happen even with well-meaning editors, much less from vandals and the problems which come up in problematic reverts, etc.
Is there a designated place to discuss this sort of thing?
In my mind, it would make sense to have some sort of "Vote for Freezing" page for articles of this sort. It would be almost the opposite of something like VfD -- an advanced form of FAC, whereby people would vote (and ply some attention on) as to whether an article was good enough to qualify it for this sort of enshrinement. "This article is good enough that it doesn't need people to be able to edit it constantly without discussing changes first," the status of "frozen" would imply. Some standards would need to be developed (a FA which has already run on the main page, another round of peer review, no major rewrites in the past two months, etc.) but it could work out (hopefully). Requests for Unfreezing could be done as well for those who think that an article was problematically frozen in a state which would require more than just the sorts of line edits one can do from a talk page.
So anyway, I'm not caught up on the latest status of this debate, but I think something of this sort might be a good idea, and prevent the sort of incoherence that sneaks into even good articles over a long period of time.
(And before anyone points out that this would make it hard for new users to edit such articles -- that would be the *point* of such a policy, not an unintended consequence. And it would, ideally, focus users away from such articles and onto the legions which still need basic work).
FF
The only thing I can imagine is this: when a page has reached this state it is usually through the hard work of a few editors (and I am not trying to deny the contributions of countless other people). I suggest those editors save that version of the article as sub-pages to their user pages. If there is ever major vandalism of the article, or if it seriously degrades over a long period of time, those editors have a point of reference (without having to go back through the edit history) of when they thought of it as "done."
(consider this a supplement to providing links to pages you are proud of, on your user page)
I understand if those editors have left wikipedia in the meantime, such saved pages may go with them. I do not consider this a tragic loss as far as the articles go, since there always is the edit history (although if this happens a lot it would be worth thinking about why contributors to great articles are leaving).
But let's assume most don't go away. What constitutes a great version of an article is subjective; my suggestion allows versions that are great from at least one person's point of view to be preserved, without in anyway undermining the wikiness of the article itself. By the way, I think some users already do this or something like this anyway.
Steve
Steven L. Rubenstein Associate Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology Bentley Annex Ohio University Athens, Ohio 45701
On 10/27/05, steven l. rubenstein rubenste@ohiou.edu wrote:
The only thing I can imagine is this: when a page has reached this state it is usually through the hard work of a few editors (and I am not trying to deny the contributions of countless other people). I suggest those editors save that version of the article as sub-pages to their user pages. If there is ever major vandalism of the article, or if it seriously degrades over a long period of time, those editors have a point of reference (without having to go back through the edit history) of when they thought of it as "done."
Why not just save the link?
It might even make sense to create a single page for everyone's links. And then, after a few months or whatever, we can get a diff between the "perfect article that can't be improved" and the current one. Maybe we'll find it wasn't so perfect after all. Or maybe we'll find it has degraded over time and can revert back.
All of this without page protection and without coding any new features. Freezing articles doesn't make much sense when the history is always there and it's easy to link to any historical version of a page. And now you can even make a permanent link to the *current* version of a page.
--- "steven l. rubenstein" rubenste@ohiou.edu wrote:
The only thing I can imagine is this: when a page has reached this state it is usually through the hard work of a few editors (and I am not trying to deny the contributions of countless other people). I suggest those editors save that version of the article as sub-pages to their user pages. If there is ever major vandalism of the article, or if it seriously degrades over a long period of time, those editors have a point of reference (without having to go back through the edit history) of when they thought of it as "done."
What we really need is to pay and/or bribe and/or beg a developer to fix the performance issues of the 'rate this article version' feature. Then the highest rated version of an article would be prominently linked from the top of the most recent version of the article. It would also be neat if one could indicate whether or not particular votes were useful and if the most recent version of the article is still as good or bad (a cur diff would be displayed so comparisons would be easy).
Logged-in users would have the option of displaying the highest rated version of an article if and when available. But I think it is *very* important that we never have that as a global default; the big thing wikiwiki has going for it is the instant gratification factor and vandalism should not be hidden behind a higher rated but older version.
Also, at the bottom of each page there should be an automatically-created citation line that gives the exact page version you are looking at. I see there is already a 'Permanent link' feature in the sidebar - but who the hell is going to know what that is for? Citing a Wikipedia article is currently useless w/o this feature (anybody checking such a cite could not be sure which of the many versions on any particluar day were actually used).
Another idea: I'd love to have the ability to rate other editors and trust by proxy what users whose opinion I trust think of editors they have rated (trusting by double proxy may also be useful). No data on any one person's rating would be public; the data would only be used to filter out edits made by trusted members of the community so that more attention can be paid to those who are still unknown or who are known but not trusted. Much of the major data processing for this feature could be done on the client's computer like this: *raw RC/watchlist data would be downloaded to your computer *your user ratings and the user ratings of the people whose opinion you trust are also downloaded (this would be incrementally updated as needed) *your computer would do all the sorting by user name Of course, there will still be lots and lots of extra reads and writes with this feature unless a completlely separate p2p editing client is used.
The current system is just not scaling very well. If we want to stay open, then we *need* to invest in some serious software and database improvements. All of the above will have a very significant database hit, but I think it is all worth if since it should push us toward the production of better quality content.
-- mav
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