On 12/21/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
I think you have misunderstood the concept of stable versions entirely.
Currently, new versions of an article can be added through editing an existing version of it. This *does not* change the existing version, it merely produces a new one, which is shown as default when you request a page for reading without specifying the version number. Noone can, and noone ever could, edit any *version* of an article. Just *the* article, by creating a new version. That point seems to have escaped your attention.
A stable version merely changes the *default view* from the latest version to another that has been declared stable by someone trustworthy. You can still see the latest version if you want, and you can still create new ones based on any old version.
So, the only thing that will changes is that for anons (and logged-in users depending on their settings) reading articles, the *initial* view will be the stable version. This features a text like "this is a stable version, the latest version is [[here]]" in the header.
So, despite your rather polemic claims, there is *no* (as in *0*, *zero*, *nada*) freedom taken away from anyone. Everyone can still edit every article.
On the contrary, setting a stable version will again allow the editing of perpetually protected pages! So, more freedom to anyone.
I don't think I can explain this any clearer without reverting to drawn images, so if you don't get it now, I can't help you ;-)
Magnus
And you don't seem to realize how adversarial and prejudicial the idea of stable versions is - "Oh, we have an up to date version, but we don't dare show it as the default displayed article because our up to date articles are apparently so crappy that they need to be specially cleared by our editors." Not to mention the simple effect of making the current revision even harder to find- the more work a reader has to do to get to something, the less they will read it! For an example: the New York times is only, I would estimate, about half again as hard to read as USA Today (for an equivalent amount of text); yet the NY Times has 1,136,433 ( http://www.nytco.com/investors-nyt-circulation.html) readers, as opposed to
more than 2.25 million readers for USA Today. One is easier, and the other is not.
~Maru