On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:21:42 +1100, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: [snip] 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 Obviously the set of 'approved articles' will be much smaller and much more out-of-date than the rest of Wikipedia, but the idea is that a casual reader can place greater trust in their correctness and quality than he/she can in a typical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