I am worried about Jimbo's announcement about locking some articles. See http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/20050805-1259-media-wikipedia.h...
"'There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed,' he said."
The way I read this, there would be a stable version and a current version, much like the linux kernel or just about any large bit of source code. If that's what he meant, it sounds like a good idea.
Of course, it worries me if this quote is accurate, because it makes it sound like he plans on imposing this idea upon the community. We all know how long it takes to implement something this major by any means other than edict.
Simply freezing content seems rather unwiki, but here "lock" is just a misnomer for "extended protection," allowing sysops only to edit them.
Both are incredibly "unwiki", the whole basis of a wiki is that anyone can directly edit it, not just sysops, and not just by proposing edits and hoping one of the editors implements them. But the goal of Wikipedia is to be a free encyclopedia, not a wiki. Wiki is just a means to that end.
_________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
"'There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed,' he said."
This is a translation into English of a statement in German which was a translation of something I said in English.
The bit about this being an "announcement" is, well, something they just made up from scratch. I made no particular announcement. A reporter asked me the usual sort of question about "how can we trust it if it can always be changed, maybe it was good but it gets vandalized then, etc."
And I gave my usual sort of answer that we are discussing ways to identify particular versions of articles as being good and that we won't ever lock articles permanently, even if we do have a stable branch.
Somehow this was turned into an "announcement" that we are changing editorial policy and forming a committee to determine which articles to lock in perpetuity.
I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)
We all know how hopelessly unreliable the things we read on the Internet are. :)
Anthony DiPierro (anthonydipierro@hotmail.com) [050806 08:35]:
The way I read this, there would be a stable version and a current version, much like the linux kernel or just about any large bit of source code. If that's what he meant, it sounds like a good idea. Of course, it worries me if this quote is accurate, because it makes it sound like he plans on imposing this idea upon the community. We all know how long it takes to implement something this major by any means other than edict.
Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article", "Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for a distribution. Any branching and polishing would be left as late as possible. Think of the Mozilla process, where the alpha, beta and final are branched from the nightlies, slightly polished for a few days (or weeks) and then released. This would provide minimal disruption of and diversion of resources from the live Wikipedia.
- d.
On 06/08/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article", "Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for a distribution.
Remind me. What is preventing this from being done?
Dan
Dan Grey (dangrey@gmail.com) [050808 08:15]:
On 06/08/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article", "Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for a distribution.
Remind me. What is preventing this from being done?
Code issues. Magnus' code works well enough to demonstrate the feature, but switching on the present implementation on en: would bring the wiki to a screeching overloaded halt. See [[m:Article validation feature]] and the link to Brion's message about it. Brion is also not entirely convinced the feature is a good idea, but if someone can write code that doesn't do hideous things to the Wikimedia databases then it's got a chance. Magnus is very much after people to work on it. Presumably it needs some deep thinking about algorithms that won't overload the database.
- d.