Daniel Mayer wrote:
Hiding development versions and greatly reducing new recruitment will result in development versions that, on average, deteriorate with time, instead of improve.
Sunshine is the best medicine. Development versions need more sunshine than stable versions do. Just make it very clear to the reader what is what and that they can log-in to view stable versions by default.
That seems reasonable, so long as it's very clearly/prominently labeled as the development version, rather than "stable version" just being another one of the tabs next to "history" and "edit this page" or something. Basically, it should be possible to respond to any "I found [inaccuracy x] in Wikipedia" with "well, did you check the stable version, or the one we very clearly marked as in development?"
-mark