I would like to discuss an approach that is a modification of the way Scholarpedia works. I am very conservative in my views of modifying the way things already work. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I think this approach has some relevance. The idea is that all contributions go into a status pending bin. They furthermore appear anonymous until they are actually accepted. Registered users can sign up as "curators" to as many articles as they like, and they are allowed to vote as to whether or not that contribution is accepted. Because the suggested text appears anonymous at first, it will be judged on its actual merits rather than ad hominem. After it has been accepted it shows up in the history log with the author's user name, if they have one. This follows the idea that we want more edits on lower quality pages and fewer edits on higher quality pages. The number of edits per page increases faster than the number of pages. This means that low quality pages are becoming high quality faster than we can add new ones. Thus, this approach is relevant for articles that have already achieved a high degree of maturity. For example, those few thousand that have been classified by the Wikipedia Editorial Team as either FA, A, GA and possibly B. Because we slow down the rate of change of these articles (but do not stop it), they are only likely to get better and not worse. We sometimes see a phenomenon where a featured article will lose featured status. That's a sad sign that good articles change too fast relative to their maturity. This also encourages editors to think about their contributions, and also to contribute to articles that are not already mature. I would be interested in hearing what other Wikipedians think about this approach. What are the downsides and what are the upsdies that I did not cover? Cheers, Brian Mingus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alterego _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l