Daniel Mayer wrote:
So showing stable versions by default will *kill* one
of the best aspects of Wikipedia; its
ability to record history as it happens. It will also encourage needless forking of
articles with
stable versions whenever its subject is in the news. Not because doing that is best for
covering
the subject, but *only* to be able to report on the current events (no stable version =
live
version is displayed).
How would marking a revision as stable cause a fork of an article when
the subject comes up in the news? Editing would still be done from the
latest revision.
For that matter, it should be standard practice to unflag the stable
version if current events make it too obsolete. And if there is no
stable version (for most of our articles at present, there shouldn't
be), then everyone gets the editable version by default regardless.
For these reasons and others, I am **EXTREMELY**
against hiding the live version behind stable
ones on Wikipedia. If that is what they want, then there will be plenty of mirrors that
will only
display stable versions of our articles. Or they could simply choose to view stable
versions by
default; either by clicking on a 'View stable version of this article' link for
selected articles
or logging in and setting their preferences for that.
Trying to twist the arms of casual readers into doing any of this is a
fool's errand. If they're on Wikipedia already, they're not going to do
the work to figure out which sites mirror our stable versions (as
opposed to outdated unstable versions) and navigate to those sites. And
using low-quality content to try and lure people to sign in for the
better stuff is one of the mistakes that turned AOL into the butt of so
many jokes.
--Michael Snow