Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) wrote:
The fuss is about the fact that under the stable versions policy, Wikipedia will change from becoming a fully open, free wiki encyclopedia, to a static encyclopedia with a wiki *option*. It reminds me of both the failed Nupedia and the structure Encarta announced a few months ago to make itself more "open".
I might not agree with your analogies, but if you voice this criticism now, others are likely to do the same, and that means it would be wise to have the counterarguments ready. Instead of saying "we should have stable versions", we should state exactly what the current problem is, so we can tell if the new approach succeeds or fails to solve it.
In the beginning, someone must have thought "if I only had a free online encyclopedia...". What we have now with Wikipedia might not (yet) fulfill the need of an (all-round) encyclopedia, but it certainly is a database of many good articles, from where you can often pick what you need.
Instead of thinking of (the English) Wikipedia as a basket of 850,000 articles in their current version, we can think of it as a basket of X million article-versions. Maybe I like the latest version of the article on Gabon, but the December 3 version of the article on Angola. For another article, say Vadsbo (a stub), I might be frustrated with every version, and this is no different from a topic where Wikipedia has no article at all. Every article-version in this collection of X million is free under GFDL, and can be used as the basis for new article-versions. Anybody can add new article-versions to the collection.
Currently Wikipedia works under the assumption that the latest version of any article is the best one, and the only one that should be linked from other articles, shown to the public and indexed by search engines. It is important that we realize that this *is* an assumption, it does represent a design choice, and not necessarily the optimal one.
If I'm compiling a Wikireader or a similar subset of articles, I might pick my article-versions under very different assumptions.
I'm surprised that Wikipedia mirrors such as Answers.com don't work more like Wikireaders, where a human editor picks useful article-versions and leaves the stubs unmirrored. The added value from such an "editor's choice" would be a perfectly valid business model.