Alfio Puglisi wrote:
There are some independent issues there have been mixed up, confusing the discussion:
Indeed, this is the usual pattern when stable versions are discussed. :)
- Using the review process to somehow decide that a certain revision
of an article is the good one. That's the stable revision.
No problem here, always nice to add more tools to the toolbox. I've been wanting this sort of development since forever.
- What to present readers. The latest revision? The last stable
revision? Some combination of the two?
This is where I'm differing from Magnus. I think the "default" view should be the latest version, not the stable version, because that's the version that we need editors to actually _work_ on. Wikipedia is a work in progress, our goal is to _produce_ an encyclopedia rather than merely _displaying_ one. Displaying or otherwise making use of the encyclopedia we're writing can be done by our many mirrors, or whoever else wants to - the "stable" tag will presumably be in the database for them to base decisions on. When someone comes to a Wikipedia page we should be saying "here's what we're working on, can you do anything to help us improve it?" I suspect by instead saying "here's our best effort so far, we'll let you know if we come up with anything better" we're going to lose a lot of impulse editors that may subsequently metamorphose into Wikipediholics.
By all means, have a prominent "click here to see the stable version of the article" up in the banner and on the sidebar and in the footer and wherever else it can be spammed. Maybe flashing warning signs telling of how the current revision is a work in progress (handy even if there's no stable version to see). But IMO making it the default is ungood.