[WikiEN-l] Approval marking (was: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia)

[Poor, Edmund W]

For more than 90% of articles, there have been no reversion wars. The
latest version is accurate, uncontroversial and fairly well
spell-checked & copy-edited.

Of the remaining 10% of articles, there are some subjects which would
benefit from some sort of approval marking system. Still, I hope for
these that we will include the 'development version' along with any
'approved' versions in Wikipedia 1.0 print or DVD publications.

For that fraction of 1% which are highly controversial, approval marking
is not really an issue. No academic or cleric has sufficient authority
to settle the hottest disputes of our times. 

So let's concentrate on putting into effect a system which will boost
consumer acceptance of 90% to 99% of our articles. Librarians aren't
warning students against our global warming or Invasion of Iraq articles
-- or at least we don't care much if they do. But it would be nice if
our math and physics articles, as well as our non-controversial history
and biology articles, could get some respect.

Ed Poor      
Who has thought about this a lot, while reading Snow, Mayer, et al.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Snow [mailto:wikipedia at earthlink.net] 
> Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 1:29 AM
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 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
> 
>