Daniel Mayer wrote:
Editing would go on as it does now and there would be no forks in development; periodically a new snapshot of the development version will be taken to serve as the new stable version. A prominent link to the stable version would be placed on top of the article and cur diffs between it and the current development version would be added.
*nods vigorously*
People would need to log in and change their preferences to see stable versions by default (the other way around would hide vandalism in the development version; besides, the most recent/up-to-date version should be on top anyway).
IMHO the opposite needs to be true; reviewed, stable versions need to be right on top, as what the public sees by default.
Sure, there'll be a big fat message showing that 78573 more edits have been made to [[George W. Bush]] since this reviewed version, with a handy link to go right to it and see the changes, but they're gonna see the stable copy first.
We've spent so much time hyping Wikipedia that it's become quite popular at its present location; a separate or hidden click-through stable set will basically never be seen and can't reasonably answer the (totally valid) criticisms that a reference site needs to be a little bit conservative on its public face.
By all means, we should let the vandalism and the JOSH IS GAY and the GWB penis pictures and the occasional bit of alleged libel -- and the genuine building up and back-and-forth of new material development -- happen one level removed from the millions-of-hits-per-day.
Most of those visitors *aren't* participating editors, and on a relatively mature site like en.wikipedia we need to recognize this and act accordingly to meet their requirements as well as those of visitors who start participating. Will it be a speed bump? Yes, it will. But with an industrial firehose-sized stream of visitors, a speed bump is NOT A BAD THING.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)