On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Magnus Manske wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
But it's really not joyful to see bad writing in two very prominent articles.
Just as a reminder, there *is* a validation/rating/whatever-you-call-it system sitting in MediaWiki for month, waiting to be tested.
I'm attaching this to Magnus' email not so much as a response, but to throw out an idea for allowing us to put this into testing, & hopefully production.
As I understand, the issue why this feature has not been enabled on Wikipedia is because of the load it would put on the servers: keeping track of another mesh of tables with the validation values for every revision of articles would bring the system to its knees.
What about only allowing users to rate *ONE* version of an article at a time. If someone makes changes to an article, & you think it decreases the quality, you can keep your rating on the older version; if it improves the article, you move your rating to the lastest version. And users can monitor all of this by using their watchlist function.
The one drawback I see with this (besides that it might not solve the problem with the processors) is that contributors can only watch so many articles, due to our own grey processor limits: while I've heard of folks having thousands of articles on their watchlists, I suspect more people are like me, with less than 200 articles watchlisted. So if the practical limit is that users can only rate 400 articles (to pick a number) at a time, & we have 400-600 active users rating articles, then there will be between 160,000 - 240,000 ratings. While that may look like enough to cover a good chunk of Wikipedia's 750,000+ articles, we need a minimum of ratings on each article to really make this system work: if we need a minimum of 5 ratings (again, to pick a number), we will have only 32,000 - 48,000 articles with ratings.
But we'd have 5% - 7% of our articles with some kind of rating, which is more than the approximately 0.15% of articles we've labelled FA, & it would allow us to at least start on this problem.
Geoff