Kai Kumpf wrote:
Dear all
although I am really glad that i spurred such a lifely discussion over
"stability" matters, let me make a few remarks as to what I think is
taking the wrong direction.
First of all, I never proposed a filtered view on WP for the general
public. There are deficiences, vandalisms and all in it and I can see
simply no way to come up with a stable version however you might
define that out of the blue at this stage. Some of your comments
indicated that there should be editing in the background of the
article that should somehow be promoted to the front - given the
changes have reached a qualitatively satisfying level. Frankly, I do
NOT believe in such a method which would require splitting the
community into less and more equal editors.
On the contrary, my proposal was and still is: Leave the view on the
data alone, do not try to nominated a board of editor's editors but
RAISE the threshold for offhanded edits by absolutely requiring a
minimum of reference / source information besides the comment line.
This information should be as immutable as the comment line and not
included in the article ("==References=="). This should make it
successively harder and harder for matured articles to insert
contradicting information (I am not mentioning confusing information
due to the editor's lack to express him/herself!) So far nobody has
convinced me of the contrary.
So I write that this guy was suspected to be involved in the JFK
assassination. As source, I cite a magazine article from that year.
Who's going to bother checking this? More precisely, who, of all the
people who could have checked all the time the article was there
containing bogus information, would check now that there's a source given?
Citing sources is good to defend a claim. But the claim in the above
case was never disputed in the first place. Because noone bothered.
Noone felt responsible. And if there's a source given which is not
available through a mouse click, noone will bother either.
The only way to assure quality for the (casual) reader is to
* say "noone checked this article" *or*
* say "this article (in that version) was checked and approved by User:XYZ"
*Only then* the reader will know someone sincere checked this article.
Currently, we do no such thing; we present every article "as is", giving
the impression that it is an encyclopedia article, which implies (again,
to the casual reader) that it has in fact been checked. Which is the
whole problem with the now-famous JFK story.
Magnus