Fred Bauder wrote:
What if he had never found it?
We need more fact checking.
The validation system will, no doubt, suffer from two "flaws" in the regard of offering reliability: 1. Anyone (at least, anyone with a username, if we turn off anons) can "validate" 2. Validations will have to be interpreted to simplify them to a good/suspicious/bad rating
There is a radical alternative, which I have begun to code a few weeks ago. It alters a MediaWiki installation to "import-only", replacing editing with an import function for an article version from wikipedia. As the imported articles are not editable at all, they do not represent a fork, merely a static wikipedia snapshot, alas per article and not for the whole wikipedia. Such a system would allow imports only for logged-in users, and be invite-only.
I am aware that this is the complete opposite of the wiki principle. But maybe this is what is needed here - a counterweight, to balance that dreadful freedom of the wiki ;-)
Individuals could then chose which "issue" to read, and mirrors could decide if they want to go for "slow quality" or "fast unreliability"...
Yes, a few people (compared to Wikipedia editors) will take a long time to check/fix/import all Wikipedia articles. Also, the imported versions will soon be outdated compared to Wikipedia. So what? This site will be for reliability; Wikipedia is for development and current events coverage.
I would see such a site working in parallel to the validation feature. Some might argue that this would "split out forces", with some people validating and some importing. OTOH, a little friendly compedition might do good for motivation.
Lastly, there is one major reason to deploy such a site: Because it will undoubtedly be deployed, by someone, sooner or later; I'd rather it's us doing it than some company.
Magnus