[WikiEN-l] No forks! (was: Re: Print edition)

[Daniel Mayer]

>Why not make it equivalent to a language Wikipedia? 
>We already have the 'Simple English' Wikipedia. The 
>other language type link on an article could tell you 
>the page had been selected (or moved).   

No offense, but this is a horrendously bad idea. We should instead focus on
adding a good category system and on writing articles in news style so that the
first section of each article is a concise article in its own right (I call
this the 'lead section'). 

I also think that Simple was a bad idea as well since the lead section can and
should be written in language that can be understood by an average person - no
special knowledge of the subject area should be required to understand the lead
section. 

In addition, it would be nice to have the ability to mark particular versions
of articles as "ready for print" (via a sifter-like mechanism). Then when the
Concise Wikipedia script parses the database it would create concise articles
out of the lead sections of every article version that was marked 'ready for
print'. That would prevent any vandalism from entering the print edition. 

Thus we have no forks and no freezing of Wikipedia articles. We could also
create an updated version of Wikipedia Concise with each database backup. Such
a thing would be great to have in a format that could be used by PDAs and palm
top PCs. Hm. MediaWiki Lite... 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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