I don't think "stable version" is supposed to mean
"error-free vesion". It is simply supposed to mean
stable. How each wiki decides to use this feature is
up to the local community. It is not something that
will be decided on a foundation level, which is the
topic of this list. If you are interested in how a
particular wiki will mark stable revisions, I think
you should ask on the village pump (or equivalent) of
that wiki.
Birgitte SB
--- Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I understand that this is a planned feature for the
MediaWiki software.
I heard recently that a co-founder of Wikipedia has
become highly
dissatisfied with it on account of it containing so
many factual errors that
it was useless (and beyond repair), and he's quite
right - this is a major
issue that needs to be addressed. Obviously, the
ability to mark
revisions is the perfect solution. If there was a
way to pick out a revision
as being error-free (I assume, synonymous with
"stable"), Wikipedia could
potentially progress towards being an
academically-citable encyclopedia.
I was just wondering who would feasibly *do* the
marking as a stable
revision? Obviously if this can be done by any users
then there will be no
advantage to it (as just the same liability toward
inserting errors will
transfer into a liability towards marking stable
revisions which aren't
actually stable). If you restrict it to registered
users then there will
still be no advantage, as even long-time registered
users often vandalise
and get things wrong. If you restrict it to admins
then there will be too
few of them.
The real problem is that it will take proper
peer-reviewing - by experts -
to really mark an article as "stable" in the sense
of containing none of the
errors and mistakes that caused the aforementioned
co-founder to give up on
Wikipedia. Obviously this is because any average
editor (even an admin) is
not necessarily qualified to declare an article
error-free. Certainly, if
nothing else, it will take expert-reviewing to bring
an article up to
"citable" standards.
So how do we currently suppose this will all work?
Will the Foundation hire
experts to check articles? Will we rely on expert
volunteers contacting the
Foundation so that they can be given "expert"
accounts that can mark stable
revisions? Or will we just allow long-time trusted
editors to mark versions
as stable, which leaves us in the same position of
not knowing whether the
article is *mistakenly* stable or not?
One feasible way I can see this as working is
defining an arbitrary amount,
say 100, that has to be reached for an article to
become stable. If one
person marks a revision as stable, it gets +1, and
if they are a more
trusted editor (been around for longer, done more
major non-reverted edits)
then it may get +5. If someone marks it as unstable
it gets -5 (weighting
towards holding back). And so on. Then if the
article reaches 100 it becomes
stable. This method roughly solves the problem of
there being vandal or
mistaken stable articles, but assumes that one
revision of an article will
stick around for long enough to be evaluated in this
manner. Will we have to
freeze the page after an admin puts it into
"evaluation mode", or perhaps
set it aside into a subsidiary page where it is
evaluated, after that
revision has been nominated for Stable Revision
Evaluation? Obviously this
is all a very tricky issue because we're dealing
with a wiki!
I was just wondering what people thought of these
issues, and what plans
there are, if there are any.
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