On 12/20/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske(a)web.de> wrote: Oh, it would change very significantly. Under the first model, if stable versions are to be locked, then obviously no-one could edit them, thus going against the principle of Wikipedia. If the second proposal is to be adopted, which involves creating a new namespace/subpage for stable versions, it would still reduce the freedom of editors. Wikipedia was founded on the principle that *anyone* could edit the encyclopedia, and that their edits would be immediately seen. If the stable versions proposal becomes policy, there will be two versions of each article. Of course, the stable version would become the most respected version, while the "open" version would become sort of a draft. Therefore, when someone makes an edit to the editable version, his edit won't be immediately reflected in the stored version, even if it's an update. And when there's two versions of an article, readers will always choose the stable version, and thus, any edits to the editable version basically become unnecessary until they become incorporated into a new stable version, which according to the proposal, takes a large amount of consensus. Thus, Wikipedia's open, immediate nature becomes very cumbersome and it would become sort of like a Nupedia - a peer-reviewed encyclopedia instead of a true open encyclopedia. I think the proponents of these policies hide behind the fact that they are only "minor changes", but I think that all of the new proposals - from banning anons from creating articles, to semi-protection to stable versions, are all slippery-slope attempts to somehow make Wikipedia more restricted to combat vandalism. Combating vandalism is a worthy cause, but freedom comes first. We're the free encyclopedia, after all. Ronline

Neil Harris wrote: Writing an encyclopedia is the goal, but we must be careful not to kill the golden goose that gave us what we have so far. I would like prefilled new article templates (presumably an option logged-in editors could switch off) as I outlined on wikien-l: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/034414.html - and to switch article creation back on for anons on en:. 1. The editors of good will can see from the prefill what an article should be shaped like and write better new articles. 1a. Those it annoys can switch it off. 2. The editors of bad will are just creating login names anyway. - d.

--- "Wikipedia Romania (Ronline)" <rowikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: Wikipedia is free in the sense that its content can be distributed freely. Being free to edit is a means to an end to create the encyclopedia. It is not the point of it. That said, this is my understanding of the two features that will hopefully be implemented in January. 1) Delayed editing: Something that has been talked about and wanted for years. This would give admins to the ability to soft-protect pages that are frequent targets of vandalism (such as [[George W. Bush]] on the English Wikipedia). Ideally this feature would automatically delay edits by anons and new users and post them, again automatically, after an amount of time that was set by an admin for that page (similar to setting IP/user name block time periods). This would give RC patrolers time to cancel vandalistic edits before they are posted for all to see. But last I heard this feature (so far) would require a great deal of manual effort by admins; one would need to set versions manually and I do not think the feature distinguishes between anons, new users or old users. I personally think that this feature should not go live until it is fully functional (esp since it is way too similar, as is, to the below feature). The point of this feature is to help avoid displaying vandalism. 2) Approved versioning: A new user class would be created that would be charged with approving certain article versions. Accuracy, bias, completeness and readability would be checked (by reader article validation and the approving user). If an article version is good enough (sic: does not need to be feature article quality; just good enough) in those regards, then an approved version would be set. A prominent link to this version would then automatically be placed on top of the article. Users would have the choice to set their preferences so they see these approved versions by default. But, and this is important, the live version would be displayed by default. But all live versions would be clearly labeled as such (even those w/o approved versions) so readers know what they are getting. So Wikipedia would not fundamentally change as a result. The point of this feature is to give readers some assurance, however small, that what they are reading is more likely true and reasonably good than not. -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) wrote: Those are tactics to build a free encyclopedia, not "core values". Process is secondary to the result, not the other way around. If WP were to be somehow finished tomorrow, and all editing was permanently disabled as a result, I would be completely happy because the goal was achieved. Stan

There is something that you don't seem to understand. By making the stable version default to the majority of readers, then Wikipedia's instant editability becomes compromised. I'll give you an example - say a stable version has been created for an article about the Romanian economy. Monthly, stats change, and I'd also like update some prose about the role of ICT in the Romanian economy. So, as an editor, I go to the editable version and change it, and - bang - as you said, it's instantly there. BUT, and this is the big but, my edits would not be instantly displayed on the default version. People coming into the Romanian economy article would see the old stable version, and only *if* they choose to see the updated version, which people won't do for lack of verifiability, would they see the new data. Now, you're going to say to me - aah, but the stable version can always be updated. Yes, I concede that, but the proposal states that for a stable version to be approved, it must go through a lot of consensus (otherwise, what's the point?). So, I hope you see that stable versions goes against the very nature of "instantly-editable" Wikipedia. People will no longer be encouraged to update stats, to add new, *good* information, if they know that their information won't be immediately accessible, but will only be featured on what is in practical purposes a secondary draft version. Do you realise that that is still a very significant change, as explained above? So, despite your rather polemic claims, there is *no* (as in *0*, Don't get me wrong here - I'm not trying to make polemic claims. I'm not trying to insult anyone. It's just a bit annoying that Wikipedia is about to launch something that will change its nature significantly, and there seems to be no awareness to it. What's more, everyone is saying "well, the changes aren't big at all. Why are you worrying?" On the contrary, setting a stable version will again allow the editing What perpetually protected pages? Not to insult anyone, but this smells so much like election propaganda. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy says: A permanent or semi-permanent protection is used for: - Protecting high visibility pages such as the Main Page<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>from vandalism. - Maintaining the integrity of the site's logo. - Maintaining the integrity of key copyright and license pages (for legal reasons). - Maintaining the integrity of press releases. - Protecting certain *"system administration"* pages. - Protecting the often-used texts in the MediaWiki namespace. - User pages and their subpages that are subject to repeated vandalism. So, the policy doesn't allow for *articles* to be protected. And, never have I seen an article protected indefinitely before. Ronline

Alfio Puglisi wrote: Indeed, this is the usual pattern when stable versions are discussed. :) No problem here, always nice to add more tools to the toolbox. I've been wanting this sort of development since forever. This is where I'm differing from Magnus. I think the "default" view should be the latest version, not the stable version, because that's the version that we need editors to actually _work_ on. Wikipedia is a work in progress, our goal is to _produce_ an encyclopedia rather than merely _displaying_ one. Displaying or otherwise making use of the encyclopedia we're writing can be done by our many mirrors, or whoever else wants to - the "stable" tag will presumably be in the database for them to base decisions on. When someone comes to a Wikipedia page we should be saying "here's what we're working on, can you do anything to help us improve it?" I suspect by instead saying "here's our best effort so far, we'll let you know if we come up with anything better" we're going to lose a lot of impulse editors that may subsequently metamorphose into Wikipediholics. By all means, have a prominent "click here to see the stable version of the article" up in the banner and on the sidebar and in the footer and wherever else it can be spammed. Maybe flashing warning signs telling of how the current revision is a work in progress (handy even if there's no stable version to see). But IMO making it the default is ungood.

Magnus Manske wrote: Doesn't this defeat one of the main purposes of stable versions, marking a version of frequently-vandalized articles so that our readers and mirrors can have some reassurance that what they're looking at isn't a pack of blatant lies? I love the idea of stable versions and such, but I really don't think it's a good idea to have these new features change the default behavior of Wikipedia significantly. Maybe later after we get some solid data and experience with how stable versions are turning out we could consider making them the default view, but for now I think it should be just an option that can be ignored by those who don't want to deal with it. But our goal isn't to _show_ an encyclopedia to people, it's to get people to help us _write_ one. Let Answers.com worry about showing our material to people.

Magnus Manske wrote: I must admit I've been strongly pushing 1. in press interviews ;-) - d.

Well, someone will come and will, anyway. The difference between the current state of wikipedia and wikipedia with Magnus, this is a big shift, you must understand. It is not a minor editing change. The point is, as you said above, that we're changing our wiki nature to sort of become half-wiki. With stable versions, particularly if shown as default, Wikipedia will become a static encyclopedia, with the option to then edit articles as a secondary structure. Wikipedia is a wiki and should always stay a wiki. Any systematic form of article protection/anti-wiki structures outside of temporary bans and stuff like that is a major shift and IMO goes against the principles of wiki. Secondly, we really need to have widespread community consensus on this. It's great to see that so many people are giving their opinions here. I don't know what the plan is to lauch stable versions - whether they will simply be included in the new MediaWiki, but I think before it's introduced, people need to really be aware of this shift. Picking one example, I think [[en:Geroge W. Bush]] has been protected Well, George Bush isn't protected actually. I mean, maybe it's protected 25% of the time due to vandalism, but that's only because it goes through patterns of protected-unprotected-protected, etc. It's not systematically, permanently protected. Yes, this could be fixed for stable versions, but only at the cost of effectively locking down the main versions of potentially more than 800,000 articles! Ronline

Magnus Manske wrote: Hoi, Having a stable version makes sense when you want to prepare for a paper or a DVD version. The latest version is in my opinion the only version that is a candidate for a new stable version, doing it any other way will open up a set of problems that is too complex to contemplate. Indicating that a stable version exists, is really good and it makes sense to stimulate websites external to Wikipedia to host that content. This way they ensure that they have stable content, that the likelihood of problematic content is reduced. It would also mean that our content would have the same behaviour as the Mediawiki software, the beta version would be with us and we are continuously working towards improvement. We publish as things become available or stable. One implication of this is that we need a separate distribution channel for our stable content. From my perspective there are no reasons that I understand why we should show the "stable" version to anonymous users of any of the Wikipedia projects. Thanks, Gerard

Pawe³ Dembowski wrote: Hoi, It is not like Nupedia because of this one essential difference. This way we distribute BOTH a stable and an unstable version of our content. It is up to the mirrors what they want to host. Thanks, GerardM

Maru Dubshinki wrote: Or, you could try something new and use NPOV: "This is a stable version of this article, which has been checked by an editor. You can see and a edit newer, unchecked, work-in-progress version of this article [[here]]". Not so hard, is it? :-) "Even harder"? Currently, the current version is the first page to see. Not so hard, now is it? (I keep repeating that phrase to you - there might be a pattern). Under the proposed system, anons would have to (gasp!) click on a link, an action of unheard difficulty on the web. If they plan to hand around longer or regularly, they will usually create a user account, where you can turn that off altogether. Good ol' times at last! I pride myself of my rather active imagination, but I can not figure out what the writing style of the NY Times has to do with stable versions on wikipedia. And I sincerely doubt that is my fault. Apologies if I sound too mocking, but * I really don't see what the fuss is about (didn't read a good argument against it yet) * as I wrote in another mail to this list, I don't really insist on making the stable version the default. Wasn't even my idea, but it made sense to me. Magnus

I did, and I can assure you that I would never support anything that would have Wikipedia fall back to that. AFAIK, neither would Jimbo, for that matter :-) Magnus

On 12/22/05, Lars Aronsson &lt;lars(a)aronsson.se&gt; wrote: You'd have to spend a whole lot of money to get human editors to pick the "useful articles". It might pay off in the really long term, but it'd require a huge investment. And due to the GFDL some other company could just come along and take the results of that huge investment and drive you out of business anyway. I'm not at all surprised no one is doing it. It's enough of a value add to present a page with results from multiple different sources, organized without all the editing tools and other extraneous things useful only for editing. It's enough of a filter to just leave out article versions which were reverted within 5 minutes (or some other determined time period). Until recently the mirrors tended to perform faster as well. When I want to read Wikipedia, I go to the mirrors, not to wikipedia.org. Wikipedia just doesn't do a very good job of distributing its product, and it wastes millions of dollars of donation money trying. This is not to knock the Wikipedia, which does a great job of producing articles. I don't think you'll ever be able to cater to readers and editors on the same site though (although to some extent that comes down to a semantics question of what would be considered "the same site"). Anthony

On 12/22/05, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: If you count the money that was spent by Wikipedia before it was run by the WMF it's well over a million. For just the first quarter of 2006 it's projected at half a million. But feel free to substitute "hundreds of thousands" for "millions" if you'd like. Anthony

On 12/22/05, David Gerard &lt;fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au&gt; wrote: You're referring to the producers of the DVD, I assume. I don't know a whole lot about that project but I assumed they used some automated method to select articles for inclusion (there was a mention of only using articles which were last edited by a certain selection of logged in users), not that they had someone go through each one by hand. I guess it could be worth it to have someone give a quick one minute glance to each article. I wouldn't remove stubs though, they're a huge part of what makes Wikipedia so great. For "only" 200,000 articles at $6/hour it'd cost under $20K. Of course, that kind of assumes a DVD distribution where the barriers to entry are a bit higher than web distribution. It's not like many people are going to pay $10 a pop to read a free encyclopedia on the web. Anthony

On 12/22/05, Andrew Gray &lt;shimgray(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: volunteers, and not the company that produced the DVD. So we've gotten pretty far off the topic of "Wikipedia mirrors such as Answers.com", but still very interesting information. I can't speak for all of en:, but I'm pretty jealous of those who can understand German. Anthony

Lars Aronsson wrote: Oh, I *like* that. I agree. Indeed! - d.

Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) wrote: Articles are continuously edited over time. As time goes on, ever-newer versions will be marked as the stable version which is first shown to the public. If that means "no-one could edit them", then we already have that model! You can't change a given revision on Wikipedia; you can only make a new revision based on it. But even worse, today when we freeze an article to show a stable revision, *nobody* can edit it except an elite cabal of sysops. Is that "open"? Is that "free"? Do you really think it's better for us to *forbid everybody* from editing pages instead of finally doing what we've talked about for years and *allowing everybody* to edit them and let the "first-glance" stable versions move forward to catch up after a review? I say we *allow everybody* to edit. That means making the stable-version system that's been planned since 2002 but put off until the project matured more. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Magnus Manske wrote: Hoi, When implementing something like "stable versions" make no difference, if it means that people will still see the latest and greatest, what is the point of stable versions? And if people DO get the stable version and not the latest and greatest, how can you think it is a trick question.. or are you the trickster ? Thanks, GerardM

On 22/12/05, David Gerard &lt;fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au&gt; wrote: In case anyone's interested, [[German Wikipedia]] now has a description of the various DVD projects. Quite interesting. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk