[WikiEN-l] RE: What's wrong with the world?

[Anthony DiPierro]

>Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article
>rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article",
>"Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for
>a distribution.

I assume you're talking about rating per article, and not per revision (as 
the latter would be fairly impossible).  In that case, it'd be quite a rough 
idea indeed.

Personally I think we should just use something like featured article status 
for our rating system.  At the point where the article becomes "featured" 
(or whatever we decide to call it), that's where we'd make our branch.  
Obviously we'd have to tweak the featured article process to be more closely 
aligned with a print version (featured articles shouldn't have non-free 
images in them), but something similar to the featured article process would 
work much better than article ratings, in my opinion.

>Any branching and polishing would be left as late as
>possible. Think of the Mozilla process, where the alpha, beta and final are
>branched from the nightlies, slightly polished for a few days (or weeks)
>and then released. This would provide minimal disruption of and diversion
>of resources from the live Wikipedia.

If the Mozilla process does this, then presumably its programmers are not 
supposed to introduce brand new features during the alpha and beta stages of 
development.  I find that rather hard to believe, but maybe Mozilla is a 
small enough project that it can do such a thing.

Wikipedia isn't.  In fact, Wikipedia is still growing exponentially.  New 
information is being added faster than it can be fact checked and proofread. 
  The only way I can see avoiding a fork and coming out with a respectible 
encyclopedia would be to freeze all new development for a really long time, 
and that is obviously unacceptable.

Again, I don't know much about Mozilla development, but any major 
development project on the order of something like Wikipedia is going to 
have branches off the main trunk which are maintained for long periods of 
time.  This causes some wasted time since things need to be merged and 
backported, but it's the fastest and most efficient way to produce a high 
quality product.  I'm afraid that "slightly polished for a few days (or 
weeks)" isn't going to cut it.

Diversion of resources isn't such a big problem as long as the branch is 
maintained properly.  New information goes into the main trunk.  "Bug fixes" 
(typos, inaccuracies, small wording changes, POV removal) are implemented in 
the branch, and merged into the main trunk if applicable.  Really important 
new information (the twin towers are destroyed, the leader of a world 
superpower is assassinated, etc.) might get backported, i.e. added into the 
main trunk and then merged into the the branch; but this should be the 
exception, not the rule, and should only be done while the branch is still 
active.

Of course, maybe our only disagreement here is over how long it's going to 
take to get from the point of the fork to the point where the branch is no 
longer maintained.  In my opinion a few weeks isn't going to be anywhere 
near enough time to fix all the inaccuracies.

>
>
>- d.

Anthony

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