On 12/21/05, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) rowikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
There is something that you don't seem to understand. By making the stable version default to the majority of readers, then Wikipedia's instant editability becomes compromised. I'll give you an example - say a stable version has been created for an article about the Romanian economy. Monthly, stats change, and I'd also like update some prose about the role of ICT in the Romanian economy. So, as an editor, I go to the editable version and change it, and - bang - as you said, it's instantly there.
There are some independent issues there have been mixed up, confusing the discussion:
1) Using the review process to somehow decide that a certain revision of an article is the good one. That's the stable revision.
2) What to present readers. The latest revision? The last stable revision? Some combination of the two?
3) What to do if some flaw is found in the stable revision, and there are 827 other revisions after that, so that it's not possible to just fix a spelling error. A special editing of the stable revision would effectively "fork" the article.
I trust that point 3) is not a big problem - if an article goes downhill after a stable revision, it's more important to fix the new revisions than fix minor errors in the stable one.
Discussions about point 2) should not obfuscate the point that a way for selecting good revision is needed. What we'll precisely do with them can be argued separately.
Alfio