--- Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
How would marking a revision as stable cause a fork of
an article when
the subject comes up in the news? Editing would still be done from the
latest revision.
Because all those updates would be hidden behind the stable version. Thus a new article
would be
created that dealt just with that event so it can be linked from the Main Page and current
events.
No stable version = development version displayed.
For that matter, it should be standard practice to
unflag the stable
version if current events make it too obsolete.
It is not practical to expect we'd be able to adequately vette new versions fast
enough to keep
up.
Trying to twist the arms of casual readers into doing
any of this is a
fool's errand. If they're on Wikipedia already, they're not going to do
the work to figure out which sites mirror our stable versions (as
opposed to outdated unstable versions) and navigate to those sites.
If they want a stable version, all they need to do is click on the big fat notice at the
top of
the article that points them there. Once there, they should be able to set a cookie that
remembered their preference to see stable versions by default.
The point, however, is that Wikipedia is where content is created. That is what makes us
fundamentally different from our mirrors.
Mirrors display a static version of our content with a link to the development version on
Wikipedia. Us doing the *exact* same thing makes little sense. Being up to date is what
makes us
different from the mirrors.
All we need to do is make sure what we do display by default does not have obvious
vandalism in
it. Everything else will be links to selected older versions that have been validated for
accuracy, bias, completeness and readability (sic: Stable).
using low-quality content to try and lure people to
sign in for the
better stuff is one of the mistakes that turned AOL into the butt of so
many jokes.
Most up to date versions are most certainly not going to be the lower quality version by
any
stretch. True, that happens sometimes, but that is not the general rule. But hiding the
development version in a dark closet will not tend to make that version improve over
time.
Sunlight is the best medicine. Since stable versions are just that, static, they don't
need
medicine.
-- mav
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