Note that the "Wikipedia 0.5" WikiProject on en:wp is tackling this issue with some energy, and could use more input and nominations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_0.5_Nominations
On 6/13/06, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Delirium wrote:
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.
There is a lengthy list of proposals here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_proposals
I wanted to try to rekindle the process by summarizing some of the proposals, which I think can be grouped into three main types, and then suggest some ideas on where to go from there.
Thank you for taking the time to address this.
Ditto.
Proposal #1: Fork or freeze, then bring up to our quality standards.
<
Some cons: Either disrupts normal editing through a freeze, or results in duplicated effort with a fork. Also is likely to result in a fairly slow process, so the reviewed version of each article may be replaced with an updated version quite infrequently; most articles will have no reviewed version, so doesn't do much for increasing the typical quality of presentation on the website.
Duplication of effort is bad. Branching, rather than forking, for a very limited time duration, makes sense for various end uses. For instance, a single good revision of an article might support a dozen branches each of which pared it down to a different length. We will need a better notion of 'article revision history' that supports branching, or non-linear revisions, to properly allow for this. I believe there is some theoretical work being done on distributed version control for text...
Michael Snow writes:
This option would work well, I think, for two possible uses. One is for offline distribution, since there's less point in creating a fork that will just be another online variation on the same theme.
It will be helpful to distinguish between branching (which ends after a point and either remerges with the main trunk or is at least never modified again) and forking (starting a separate revision history with different end goals, to continue indefinitely).
Each offline copy gets modified slightly for format reasons, anyway. The question is whether to provide for such branching within a central wikipedia database.
< The second possibility I think we would benefit from is the "freeze" option of
presenting stable, reviewed versions by default to users who do not log in.
This seems a poor and less-scalable way to present stable versions to users; see other methods below.
Delirium:
Proposal #2: Institute a rating and trust-metric system
Wikipedians rate revisions, perhaps on some scale from "complete crap" to "I'm an expert in this field and am confident of its accuracy and
Naive, single-scale ratings have many problems that I don't see being overcome. (The advogato suggestions are no panacaea.) Allowing groups of editors (self-selecting, auto-selected by user properties) to provide revision metadata that others can choose to see or not see as they please would be more scalable and less gameable. Some of these groups could provide metadata of the form 'decent and not vandalized content'.
Proposal #3: Extend a feature-article-like process
I'm not sure what you meant by your example -- for instance by 'work on revisions rather than articles', as the goal is still a better article (you can't change a historical revision) -- but this is effectively what the en:wp validation effort is attempting. This scales in that it can be split up among topic-centered WikiProjects. See for instance this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/WikiProjec...
Avoiding hard-coded metrics for quality, and encouraging editors active within a topic to work together to reach quality decisions, seems in line with how editing has evolved. This is like peer review and FAC review that already takes place, but can be applied to a wider spectrum of quality.
--SJ