[WikiEN-l] Re: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

[Michael Snow]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Last time I ventured my two cents concerning the print Wikipedia, the
>>response I got led me to conlcude that there was no support for forking
>>Wikipedia even in the slightest to make the content more acceptible -- which
>>is what any approval board would end up doing. Then the project seemed to go
>>into hibernation. Then it seemed that a group was working on it. Now it
>>appears we are back to discussing what should be done.
>>    
>>
>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. 
>
If we adopt a formal approval system, the idea that all future approved 
versions will be based on development versions, rather than the last 
approved "stable" version, sounds naively idealistic to me. Even without 
an approval system, this is already not the case on some of our more 
contentious articles. When changes are not agreed on quickly, one side 
or the other, and sometimes both, may adopt the tactic of reverting back 
to an earlier version of which it "approves". However, since the sides 
generally do not approve of the same version, the dispute continues and 
often results in a revert war.

Any system that marks a particular revision as "approved" or "stable" 
will inherently increase the temptation to blindly revert changes back 
to the "stable" revision, instead of trying to work with those changes 
and improve the article. This is already a problem in some places and 
among some editors (no names, this is not an invitation for 
finger-pointing). If we want to implement a system that lets people flag 
specific article revisions, let's at least be aware of the possible 
downsides to this as well.

--Michael Snow