Larry Sanger wrote:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:
Magnus brings up an important point, which has to do with how this will interact with namespaces, and particularly the stable namespace. I think we need to have some manual control over what goes into the stable namespace, so that we can be sure that the people approving [...]
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_approval_mechanism
Many people have already made several good proposals and some surprisingly :-) polite debate has been ongoing for some time now.
I was thinking here. What if you could name and address every version of an article, e.g. http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Radio would link to the "current" or "latest" version of the article on Radio, but http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Radio/12 would link to version 12 of that article. Then somebody could "approve" version 12, or maybe have copyright to version 23, and this would not stop anybody from continuing to modify the article into version 34. You could create "Nupedia 2.0" as a web of pointers to approved versions of Wikipedia articles. The articles (and their versions) would be part of Wikipedia, but the approval mechanisms would be part of Nupedia. Any modification to a Wikipedia article would create a new version, and not change the approved version.
By separating article storage from approval, you could also have multiple approval webs. You could have Nupedia with high academic standards, and PC-pedia with high demands on political correctness, only linking to politically correct articles. Or a leftist-pedia web that only links to article versions with non-capitalist views. Or a parental-guidance-pedia that only links to articles with non-explicit contents.
I think this sort of separation would do the least harm to wikipedia, because people could continue to write wikipedia articles at the speed of light without having to think too much about getting approval. The approval could be a slower process without hampering the creativeness.