Dear all although I am really glad that i spurred such a lifely discussion over "stability" matters, let me make a few remarks as to what I think is taking the wrong direction.
First of all, I never proposed a filtered view on WP for the general public. There are deficiences, vandalisms and all in it and I can see simply no way to come up with a stable version however you might define that out of the blue at this stage. Some of your comments indicated that there should be editing in the background of the article that should somehow be promoted to the front - given the changes have reached a qualitatively satisfying level. Frankly, I do NOT believe in such a method which would require splitting the community into less and more equal editors.
On the contrary, my proposal was and still is: Leave the view on the data alone, do not try to nominated a board of editor's editors but RAISE the threshold for offhanded edits by absolutely requiring a minimum of reference / source information besides the comment line. This information should be as immutable as the comment line and not included in the article ("==References=="). This should make it successively harder and harder for matured articles to insert contradicting information (I am not mentioning confusing information due to the editor's lack to express him/herself!) So far nobody has convinced me of the contrary.
The question remains what we should mean by "matured" and which indicators we should use for quantifying maturity of an article. The raw number of edits is completely out of question if the length of the edit (insertions/deletions/modifications) is not taken into account for weighting them - effectively making the weight of the edit proportional to something like the Mahalanobis or the edit-distance known from bioinformatics. Please, folks, read again carefully and try to get away from "filtered view" phantasies. Let's not revolutionize WP. Let's simply raise the minimal editing standards just a wee little bit - which would be revolutionary enough - for my taste. Kai (kku)
Kai Kumpf wrote:
Dear all although I am really glad that i spurred such a lifely discussion over "stability" matters, let me make a few remarks as to what I think is taking the wrong direction.
First of all, I never proposed a filtered view on WP for the general public. There are deficiences, vandalisms and all in it and I can see simply no way to come up with a stable version however you might define that out of the blue at this stage. Some of your comments indicated that there should be editing in the background of the article that should somehow be promoted to the front - given the changes have reached a qualitatively satisfying level. Frankly, I do NOT believe in such a method which would require splitting the community into less and more equal editors.
On the contrary, my proposal was and still is: Leave the view on the data alone, do not try to nominated a board of editor's editors but RAISE the threshold for offhanded edits by absolutely requiring a minimum of reference / source information besides the comment line. This information should be as immutable as the comment line and not included in the article ("==References=="). This should make it successively harder and harder for matured articles to insert contradicting information (I am not mentioning confusing information due to the editor's lack to express him/herself!) So far nobody has convinced me of the contrary.
So I write that this guy was suspected to be involved in the JFK assassination. As source, I cite a magazine article from that year.
Who's going to bother checking this? More precisely, who, of all the people who could have checked all the time the article was there containing bogus information, would check now that there's a source given?
Citing sources is good to defend a claim. But the claim in the above case was never disputed in the first place. Because noone bothered. Noone felt responsible. And if there's a source given which is not available through a mouse click, noone will bother either.
The only way to assure quality for the (casual) reader is to * say "noone checked this article" *or* * say "this article (in that version) was checked and approved by User:XYZ"
*Only then* the reader will know someone sincere checked this article. Currently, we do no such thing; we present every article "as is", giving the impression that it is an encyclopedia article, which implies (again, to the casual reader) that it has in fact been checked. Which is the whole problem with the now-famous JFK story.
Magnus
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