Amaurea wrote:
<snip Nupedia comparison>
By marking a version of an article as stable, and presenting that
version to normal visitors, we are breaking down the coupling between
the number of readers and the number of editors.
No. This *might* happen only if the stable version becomes the default
for anons. Then again, it might not.
When Nupedia didn't live up to its expectations, Wikipedia was started.
It was an experiment, and it worked, so we kept it.
/That/ is the spirit of the project. If something is not right, try
something to fix it. If it works, greak, keep it; if it does not work,
so what? Anyone remember the "Nupedia Chalkboard"? It was a wiki to
initiate articles for Nupedia. It is not around anymore.
Something is wrong in wikipedia country, not with creating articles, but
with being an encyclopedia. With provding *reasonably reliable*
information to people. People who don't know wikipedia, and probably
don't really care about how the article they are reading came into
being. They want it to be correct and complete, period.
The whole point of a
wiki, and the key behind Wikipedia's incredible growth, is that every
reader is an editor, and in light of that it isn't a good idea to
create seperate views of an article for readers and editors. Any
reader reading the stable version instead of the current version will
be one less potential editor to improve the current version.
I don't know if you've seen my test page, but just below the title,
there's a line "This is the stable version. The current working version
is [[here]]".
One could
hope that people who find faults in the stable version would go to the
draft version to implement improvements there, but simply saying that
a version is stable will discourage edits, and people who still want
to make edits will be further discouraged by those edits not being
seen by the main public, but hidden away in some draft version of the
article. Thus, this will discourage positive edits for the same reason
it will discourage vandalism: It becomes slightly harder to edit,
No. Throw a switch in your user settings, and the haunting will go away ;-)
(Note that this is not implemented yet in my version; neither is showing
the stable version by default.)
and
more importantly, the results aren't immediatly visible on the main
version of the article (the one most people read).
So?
Regarding vandalism and bad pages, the wiki answer to
these is that we
have lots of people to fix those problems for the same reason the
poblems are there. There will be more vandalism the bigger Wikipedia
grows, but so will the number of people who can spot and fix that
vandalism, for the same reason.
The real problem isn't outright vandalism. The problem is the
Steigentaler incident type. Wrong information, inserted by accident or
by purpose. A stable version can prevent this. The current system has
shown it can't, not in all cases.
This is inherently scalable, so there
should be no need for any change the way we deal with this just
because the wiki has reached a given size. Wikipedia is by no means
finished. There are still millions of articles waiting to be created,
fleshed out and polished, and many already existing articles that need
to be improved. We should therefore continue to make our readers edit
our articles. Not because the wiki process is sacred in itself, but
because it has proven to be the fastest way to create an encyclopedia.
We already *have* created an encyclopedia. Now our focus has to shift
towards /being/ an encyclopedia. Our ways have to change accordingly.
Magnus