[WikiEN-l] Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

[Delirium]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at *all* -
>the only thing that will be done is selecting one version of an article that is
>approved in some way. Any future approved version would be based on the
>development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia article which would be in
>perpetual development), not the last stable version. 
>  
>
I can imagine at least one scenario that would lead to a bit of a fork, 
although whether it's a bad thing is not clear:

Imagine that we have experts of some sort working on an article.  They 
hash out between them and the others editing an article something 
reasonably neutral, and it becomes the "stable" version.  A few months 
later, they come back, and the article has been editing by 500 people in 
the meantime and become mostly a mess.  They decide to take a few of the 
good facts and improvements from the new version and "backport" them to 
the previous stable version rather than dealing with the mess of the 
development version, because frankly the last stable version was better 
(except for the few facts that were duly incorporated).  That'd be a 
fork of sorts, I suppose.

Of course, something similar happens on occasion already, which has been 
the subject of some revert wars...

-Mark