Bryan Derksen wrote:
The whole point of a wiki, and the key behind Wikipedia's incredible growth, is that every reader is an editor, and in light of that it isn't a good idea to create seperate views of an article for readers and editors. Any reader reading the stable version instead of the current version will be one less potential editor to improve the current version.
I don't know if you've seen my test page, but just below the title, there's a line "This is the stable version. The current working version is [[here]]".
That doesn't really change much if the stable version is the default. Who's going to bother checking out the current working version that isn't already a routine Wikipedia contributor? It's hard enough getting a lot of visitors to click on the "edit" link when they _do_ see a problem in need of fixing, if they have to also click on a link in order to see the problem in the first place then I don't see how the situation is likely to improve.
Well, the guy who just wants some info probably won't follow the link to the work-in-progress page. But he got what he came for, namely some (within the usual encyclopedia limits) trustworthy information. IMHO that's a good thing.
For the rest of the people who come by, the curious ones with at least a little time on their hands - they might even be less scared to edit if they know it's not directly showing for many people! Editing a dedcated work-in-progress version is IMHO less scary for a newcomer than "your changes will be visible immediately"!
No. Throw a switch in your user settings, and the haunting will go away ;-) (Note that this is not implemented yet in my version; neither is showing the stable version by default.)
That's how we should start the experiment, IMO. Change as little as possible with each new step.
As I said before, the question is if we are primarily a wiki (show work-in-progress first, with link to stable version) or an encyclopedia (show the stable version first, and link to the work-in-progress).
We already *have* created an encyclopedia. Now our focus has to shift towards /being/ an encyclopedia. Our ways have to change accordingly.
I still disagree with this. We've created an encyclopedia once I can go out and buy a copy for my shelves (either on DVD or paper-bound, whichever). Wikipedia as it exists today is still very much a work in progress despite having a number of quite nice articles. And I think it should always _be_ a work in progress. There are plenty of other sites that display Wikipedia's content, but only one site that _creates_ Wikipedia's content. Don't do anything that hinders that function.
You can buy the German wikipedia on DVD. €9,90 including a softcover book about Wikipedia. This is the third release of this DVD, by the way.
Magnus