Hi Chuck!
There are at
least two big questions about how this
ought to work:
1) How do we get new folks to dive in and
contribute? Having your
improvements show up *immediately* is a big draw to
the wikipedia
experience.
Well, we could call it beta and stable if we wanted to
and people could know that the beta version was more
up-to-date than the stable version. A lot of people
at Wikipedia are here just to read and they can keep
doing that and others are here to write and I suggest
we have a link on the bottom of each stable article
that says, "Edit this article in Beta".
I really like the idea. The argument most people come up with in a
discussion about WP (after the ones we all know ...) is, that they can't
rely on the information they find, because too few people might have
proofread it or someone might have changed the text 5 seconds before the
accessed the page.
How about a debian-like scheme (as I understand it):
* unstable/sid (still in development) = beta = what we have now
* testing = proofread by enough wikipedians in a process like the one
Chuck suggested
* stable = Nupedia (in a few years or so ;-)
I'm a bit sceptic about Nupedia and the authority idea behind it (but I
admit that I don't know much about it), but I'm sure that it will
attract many scholars.
How do we take articles out of testing or stable if a proven mistake is
found? By voting in a short time period (3 days)? Or do we need elected
maintainers?
And we will need to vote in every change that is made in the rules of
the process. It'll get much (!) more complicated that WP, but the idea
is very attracting!
I imagine all of us would still just watch the beta
anyway. :)
Of course! :-)
Bye,
Kurt
P.S.: A last association:
* unstable/sid (still in development) = anarchy
* testing = democracy
* stable = meritocracy?