I'm still seeing way too many similarities between having multiple themed Sifter groups and Erik's team certification proposal. What is the putpose of Erik's idea? From what I gather it is to create selections of articles that have been reviewed by different groups. Each group would have its own rules on certification and on who they decide should be group members. These members would "certify" certain articles based upon those criteria and then a list of articles certified by any particular group would be automatically generated. Heck, this can be done right now without any change to the software so long as group members manually added articles to a list.
Actually, what I proposed is very similar to what you propose: - Every user has a list of trusted teams. - There may be a default team that is trusted by all users, possibly the one that applies the most rigid certification criteria. - When a user views an article, he gets a notification:
"This article has been certified by Team X" "An [[older version]] of this article has been certified by Team X" "This article has been certified by Teams X, Y, and Z"
-- depending on whether the article has been changed or not since the certification, and on whether several teams have certified it or just one. Only teams trusted by the user would be listed here. It would be possible, as you suggest, to show the differences between the older version and the new, uncertified one (which is easiest if both versions are stored in the same database).
Furthermore, in order to solve the problem of stumbling across uncertified content even if you don't want to, I have suggested to give the user the option to view the entire Wikipedia in a mode where only articles certified by at least one team are displayed. This would allow all types of filtering, including the family filters that some people want.
My proposal has several advantages over a simple static HTML sifter:
- Teams can work according to different criteria. They can certify high quality articles, low quality ones, factually correct ones, stylistically correct ones, neutrally written ones etc. With different rules and different goals, they would be open not just to certified experts but to anyone who wants to take part in the quality selection process.
- It gives users the option to have both the advantages of certification and to enjoy Wikipedia as a huge, dynamic project -- it is part of the editing process, not separate from it. Certification, by default, is only an indicator, not a filter.
- It allows the combination of approval criteria (several trusted teams) for indication and filtering, something that is only possible if the filtering is done within Wikipedia.
- It makes it possible for a team culture to grow and thrive within Wikipedia (instead of requiring users to join separate sifter projects), thereby greatly increasing the potential size of the effort. It's a very wiki-ish idea because it relies a lot on social interaction.
The idea does not contradict the Sifter project, every team could define a static HTML repository where its certified articles are stored as Larry suggested.
Note that my original proposal was posted to the wikitech list and only forwarded here in part. It is here: http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-October/001089.html
Regards,
Erik