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