Wow, lots of talk about an important subject. Wonderful. What TomK has said about this -- that it requires no technical support, but instead requires defining specific reachable subprojects, drumming up community interest in them, and providing regular updates and 'prereleases' with the status of the whole project -- is absolutely right for the short-term.
Those of you who are eager to work on this, let us pick a suitable subject -- I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of the currently-underway English Readers -- and start defining the scope of our first validation effort. Feel free to write me privately with other suggestions, if you don't want to spam the list...
For a longer-term scalable solution, I think a fairly simple solution which would improve not only this 1.0 validation but also many other aspects of WP maintenance, is the creation of a page for explicitly managing metadata flags for an article -- "stub", "copyvio", ahd "wrong language" flags as well as review flags for higher-order quality validation. See the metada section of the validation article:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation#Validation_via_extra_metad...
Magnus writes:
For the record, my opionion to these:
- approvals need *not* to be on the same version, but a "disapproval"
could invalidate any prior approvals
- one approval (we can sort out bot articles/extremely long ones later)
- no rating (either it is a good one or not).
I'm not sure what you mean by 'one approval', but I agree with your first and third points -- approvals need not be on the same version (think of them as 'edits' to the article, which have to be actively removed by another editor before they are no longer part of it), and that there should be no rating scale.
Either you think it should be validated or you have a specific (hopefully fixable) set of objections. I'm not eager to create a spectrum of article-quality; certainly not along a single linear scale of Quality; it is unnatural, and as a result invites disappointment and disagreement from users, each of whom will be able to find a pair of articles that s/he considers grossly misordered.
On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 23:07:43 +0800, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
Article versions should be endorsed by simply clicking a star beside the revision in the article history, in the same way as Gmail uses to "star" an email. If we make the selection process to complicated, we'll never get around to endorsing the tens of thousands of articles we aim to have in the finished product.
gmail users everywhere agree... the review process should be very simple. (that said, I think we should prompt reviewers to evaluate an article in certain lights, according to the different qualities we would like in validated articles
Anyway, the way I think could work is to have each permitted user able to select only one revision of an article. From that, the total
As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors to improve articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the 'best' version; as such I think a simple objection/response system, where each objection should be responded to by some future editor (and where the articles steadily improve) is a good way to think about it.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation#Validation_via_extra_metad...
sj<<