Kai Kumpf wrote:
The rationale behind my suggestion is of course that articles that have matured over time are - statistically speaking - less likely to improve when large modifications are made than relatively new ones. Some of the articles have reached a stage where well-meant editing effectively mucks up the inner structure and logic.
Looking at our recent JFK-assassin mess, it doesn't need a large edit to mess up an article. The jerk who submitted the misinformation just needed "he was under investigation for killing JFK".
So why not confer a little bit more of responsibility to the authors!? He/she could be aided by predefined lists, checkboxes, comboboxes (for ref.type, etc.). Asking a little more information from authors could be a substantial part of the rising editing threshold necessary for "cooling down" WP a bit.
Because * /demanding/ things (which is effectifely what asking for sources boils down to) from volunteers might cool edits more off than we'd like * this can be gamed (mark it as a minor edit, or write "google" under sources, or give some non-existing or out-of print book, or a book in an obscure language, or set up your own fake page and then give it as source, or...)
I find myself increasingly involved in hunting down vandals and their work – partly due to the ease of use WP offers for non-serious edits, too, and I can‘t help feeling that a larger and larger part of WP keeps a larger and larger part of the community busy with just keeping up the existing standard. We mustn't be sure of still finding enthusiatic acclaim in the years to come when WP becomes a battlefield in a fight against distracting, redundant or plain wrong infobits.
As Brion already stated correctly, the current Wikipedia is an eternal beta version. Validation (how's that coming, BTW?;-) will eventually give some hints to the "end user", but it probably would not have caught the JFK blunder either.
The only way to give Wikipedia a "quality assurance" (limited to human errors, of course:-) would IMHO be a method where someone takes *professional* (not financial or legal:-) responsibility for the quality of an article. Also, this can't just be any user - user accounts are created far too easily for this. It needs to be someone who has the trust of the communtiy, someone with the "power" to say "this article version is good as it is", without having to defent this against trolls or revert-warring against vandals.
That directly leads to a (relatively) small, elite (!=cabal) group of peer reviewers. The cathedral filtering the bazaar, as I said before. This could be done externally (software's in the making), or within wikipedia. The latter would be nicer, however, it might lead to more conflict between those who can peer review and those who can not.
(It goes without saying that none of the above would alter the wiki in any way; it would be an additional feature with no technical impact on the normal Wikipedia editing).
I hope to have a demo site up shortly.
Magnus