On 12/27/05, Amaurea sigurdkn@gmail.com wrote:
Recently the concept of having stable versions of Wikipedia's pages has been gaining foothold rapidly. Most supporters of this idea portray this as a rather small change, which would help make Wikipedia more reliable and help it be taken more seriously in academic circles. It is understandable that this idea is tempting, since vandalism and decay of article has gotten a lot of focus recently, but I do not think that this is the easy, safe change many seem to think it is.
The rest of Amaurea's post is dead on.
But this is pretty exciting; the successful fork of wikipedia is only a few years away... wikinfo obviously isn't it, but their import utility is the right start. need to build that functionality for any cc-licensed work; need gfdl and cc to merge, etc.
wikipedia is still by and large a healthy community; there needs to be more ossification, paranoia, hypocrisy and institutionalization before the fork will become necessary.