I'm totally confusing between "validation", "review" and
"stable"
concepts and who want what!? On a dynamic site like Wikipedia the
"stable" concept seem very odd for me. Does that imply any restrictions
to modify the article further? Are we all ok to say an article is never
really finished?
Actually, the only problem I see is we can't give any kind of guaranties
about the exactness of a given article's revision. The featured article
label is problematic (at least on French Wikipedia) because we give it
to an article (instead of a revision) and with the open system used by
Wikipedia we can't assure the future revisions will not contain any
errors. In an other hand, any kind of restriction of editing a validated
article is contrary to the open spirit of the Wikipedia project.
Finally, I think we must clearly separate the review and the validation
process. The first is a nice optional feature that tells what the
community thinks about an article and/or revision quality, while the
second is a really important feature that just tells "(we really think)
there is no error in this revision" (this mean an article can be
incomplete but "valid").
("Review" and "validation" are the right words to describe the
above?)
My proposal [1] only relate to "validation". The main idea is to allow
marking any revision of an article as "valid" (by community consensus,
validators or an other process to be determined) and use this flag to
change some navigation behaviors and give some visual feedback.
2 navigation behaviors:
- Validate: When consulting an article with a validated revision
existing in history, this validated version is show (otherwise the more
recent non-validated revision is shown). When viewing a validated
revision and a more recent non-validated exist, a link to this revision
is add in navigation panel ("last development"). [default for anonymous]
- Development: As now but when a validated revision exist in article
history a link to this revision is add in navigation panel ("last
validate"). [default for logged users]
Visual feedback:
- A validated article revision has a different class (CSS) to allow
customize its style (different background color, specific information
box, etc.).
- History highlights (via style) the validated revisions.
Any comments are welcome here or on the proposal talk page.
Aoineko / Guillaume Blanchard
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Aoineko/Validation/en