--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
How would marking a revision as stable cause a fork of an article when the subject comes up in the news? Editing would still be done from the latest revision.
Because all those updates would be hidden behind the stable version. Thus a new article would be created that dealt just with that event so it can be linked from the Main Page and current events. No stable version = development version displayed.
For that matter, it should be standard practice to unflag the stable version if current events make it too obsolete.
It is not practical to expect we'd be able to adequately vette new versions fast enough to keep up.
Trying to twist the arms of casual readers into doing any of this is a fool's errand. If they're on Wikipedia already, they're not going to do the work to figure out which sites mirror our stable versions (as opposed to outdated unstable versions) and navigate to those sites.
If they want a stable version, all they need to do is click on the big fat notice at the top of the article that points them there. Once there, they should be able to set a cookie that remembered their preference to see stable versions by default.
The point, however, is that Wikipedia is where content is created. That is what makes us fundamentally different from our mirrors.
Mirrors display a static version of our content with a link to the development version on Wikipedia. Us doing the *exact* same thing makes little sense. Being up to date is what makes us different from the mirrors.
All we need to do is make sure what we do display by default does not have obvious vandalism in it. Everything else will be links to selected older versions that have been validated for accuracy, bias, completeness and readability (sic: Stable).
using low-quality content to try and lure people to sign in for the better stuff is one of the mistakes that turned AOL into the butt of so many jokes.
Most up to date versions are most certainly not going to be the lower quality version by any stretch. True, that happens sometimes, but that is not the general rule. But hiding the development version in a dark closet will not tend to make that version improve over time.
Sunlight is the best medicine. Since stable versions are just that, static, they don't need medicine.
-- mav
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