[WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

[Delirium]

David Gerard wrote:
> On 27/08/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> http://news.com.com/Can+German+engineering+fix+Wikipedia/2100-1038_3-6108495.html
>> A related source.... not the BBC.
>> "We want to let anybody edit," Wales said, "but we don't want to show
>> vandalized versions."
>>     
>
>
> Yeah. When did Jimbo first ask for this, early 2005? People pretty
> much concurred it was a fantastic idea (logged-in editors get the live
> version, anon readers get the last-non-vandal-edit version), but it
> was considered technically rather painful indeed in the then-current
> structure of Mediawiki.
>
> If it looks workable now, that's fantastic, and should help make it a
> better no. 17 website in the world *and* a good perpetual working
> draft.
>   

I have the same opinion.  Most of the improvements to Wikipedia that 
have been ongoing, like requiring citations, improve the average quality 
of articles.  At any given second, though, the quality can always be 
quite abysmal.  A system like this one essentially smooths out the 
presented version, so the average reader sees something more like the 
average recent state of the article, rather than its instantaneous 
state.  That doesn't magically make articles good, but it reduces the 
number of times people see really bad articles.

-Mark