On Thu, 2002-10-31 at 18:30, Poor, Edmund W wrote: <snip> My philosophy is that everything that is alive is an experiment. If Wikipedia had filter/certification/locking/freezing mechanisms, it would be that much more dead. It is the changeability of Wikipedia that captures the best of life. As individuals and as a society, we die, fail, kill, and suffer. But I'd rather live and suffer than not live at all. And I'd rather build a society that changes and grows, and sometimes makes missteps, than one safely locked in stasis. And I hope that Wikipedia will remain mutable and organic, instead of frozen and deadened. What do you mean? We do it now. If you want 100% safety/cleanness, you have to seriously compromise openness. If you're satisfied with 99.9% safety and cleanliness, you don't. (We're probably at 95-99% now as a time-space average, and with proper non-restrictive tools, that percentage can be raised). You throw away the obsolete mechanisms of certification. How do we know gravity works? Not because Einstein told us so, but because it pervades our experience, in time and space. As Wikipedia grows, it will continue to become ever more part of the underlying structure of the noosphere. Another way of looking at this is the quality of Wikipedia is a statistical phenomenon, not a result of particular decisions. Also Toby Bartels. You want ideas? See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sourceberg (aka SourceLink). I was discussing this a year ago. That's the right way to deal with this issue, as a complementary project. (If I may say so myself. STG was on a better track implementationwise than I.)