On 6/14/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
(Mainly concerning wikipedia, but cross-posting to foundation-l because of some discussion of committees; see the end.)
We've discussed on and off that it'd be nice to vet specific revisions of Wikipedia articles so readers can either choose to read only quality articles, or at least have an indication of how good an article is. This is an obvious prerequisite for a Wikipedia 1.0 print edition, and would be nice on the website as well.
I'm working on a set of consolidated specifications for this, please give me a few days until I finalize it (it's a fairly large document). Allow me to quote from the set of requirements I start with:
* revision-specific tagging rather than article-specific tagging * changeset-oriented: when possible, only review the changes from the last reviewed revision to the next unreviewed one * scalability in the overall quantity of articles reviewed per time unit * distinction between different types of review, such as vandalism, accuracy, neutrality, copyright status, etc. ** acknowledge that different people have different abilities to review these different aspects of an article * systematically involving editors who are self-selected as being qualified in the particular disciplines * universal applicability to Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, and any other open wiki project using MediaWiki * facilitate fixing problems over tagging them * discoverability. All aspects of the user interface should be discovered by the average wiki editor during normal use of the system. * fun. Any review process must be addictive and simple in order to motivate long term interest.
I've been mulling over this problem since 2002 and I think that all proposed processes fail in several of these criteria. That is not to say that I believe I have the "one answer", but I hope the specs I'm working on will become a basis for further renewed discussion, and lead directly towards a realistic implementation path.
Erik