Recently the concept of having stable versions of Wikipedia's pages
has been gaining foothold rapidly. Most supporters of this idea
portray this as a rather small change, which would help make Wikipedia
more reliable and help it be taken more seriously in academic circles.
It is understandable that this idea is tempting, since vandalism and
decay of article has gotten a lot of focus recently, but I do not
think that this is the easy, safe change many seem to think it is.
Wikipedia was started as an alternative to the stagnating Nupedia,
which had the same goal as Wikipedia - to make a free encyclopedia -
but tried to do this through the traditional means of experts and peer
review. Nupedia failed because there were few editors, no fresh supply
of new editors, and difficult to make changes. Wikipedia's wiki model
changed that by making every reader an editor and making it easy for
them to edit, and after that followed an exponential increase in the
number of articles, which has lasted to this day. One explanation for
this could be as follows: For any encyclopedia it is reasonable to
assume that the number or readers is proportional to the number and
quality of articles. By making every reader an editor, Wikipedia added
a proportionality between the number of readers and the article
creation rate, that is: The rate of article creation became
proportional to the number of articles, a recipie for exponential
runaway growth.
By marking a version of an article as stable, and presenting that
version to normal visitors, we are breaking down the coupling between
the number of readers and the number of editors. The whole point of a
wiki, and the key behind Wikipedia's incredible growth, is that every
reader is an editor, and in light of that it isn't a good idea to
create seperate views of an article for readers and editors. Any
reader reading the stable version instead of the current version will
be one less potential editor to improve the current version. One could
hope that people who find faults in the stable version would go to the
draft version to implement improvements there, but simply saying that
a version is stable will discourage edits, and people who still want
to make edits will be further discouraged by those edits not being
seen by the main public, but hidden away in some draft version of the
article. Thus, this will discourage positive edits for the same reason
it will discourage vandalism: It becomes slightly harder to edit, and
more importantly, the results aren't immediatly visible on the main
version of the article (the one most people read).
Regarding vandalism and bad pages, the wiki answer to these is that we
have lots of people to fix those problems for the same reason the
poblems are there. There will be more vandalism the bigger Wikipedia
grows, but so will the number of people who can spot and fix that
vandalism, for the same reason. This is inherently scalable, so there
should be no need for any change the way we deal with this just
because the wiki has reached a given size. Wikipedia is by no means
finished. There are still millions of articles waiting to be created,
fleshed out and polished, and many already existing articles that need
to be improved. We should therefore continue to make our readers edit
our articles. Not because the wiki process is sacred in itself, but
because it has proven to be the fastest way to create an encyclopedia.
PS: The quality isn't a big problem according to some sources, such as
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html
PPS: I apologize for breaking the thread, but I wasn't on the list when
it started, so I couldn't find a way to tie this message to the
thread.