On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:21:42 +1100, David Gerard
<fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
[snip]
While reviewing content sounds like a good ide (to me
too), there should be
a way to do it wihtout seeming to repudiate the concept of the wiki. I'm
not actually wedded to the idea myself, but repudiating it as you describe
would be extremely jarring culturally and - and this is the important point
- demotivating for the volunteers.
How about a system wherein a 'reviewer' (some kind of privileged user)
or review board has the right to stamp an 'approved' label on a
particular revision of a given Wikipedia article?
After being 'reviewed', the article itself could be freely revised and
altered just like any other article, but the 'approved' label would
only refer to the past revision which was approved, and the label
would not carry forward to a new revision until it was 're-approved'.
Obviously the set of 'approved articles' will be much smaller and much
more out-of-date than the rest of Wikipedia, but the idea is that a
casual reader can place greater trust in their correctness and quality
than he/she can in a typical Wikipedia article. We could even, if
desired, create a fork consisting of only 'approved' articles which
could be used for people very concerned with correctness and quality.
(Maybe a 'fork' is the wrong word, since it would not be a one-time
move; it would simply be a different view into the usual Wikipedia.)
For example, a teacher may not feel comfortable pointing a student to
Wikipedia knowing there is a possibility, however remote, that when
the student accesses the article 'Jew' she will find a random
antisemitic rant or just wrong information. Even though we all know
such a rant would be immediately removed (as they have been before)
there is still some damage done here, and the potential for this
probably deters people from endorsing Wikipedia's use. The
approval-based Wikipedia 'fork' would suffer from limited and dated
content, but would at least not have this problem, and could be
'safely' recommended.
The danger with a system is that we could create the impression that
an article must be 'approved' to be believable; however, I think this
could be overcome by using the same arguments we use now, about the
collaborative process working most of the time.
Steve