David Gerard wrote:
On 27/08/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com>
wrote:
http://news.com.com/Can+German+engineering+fix+Wikipedia/2100-1038_3-610849…
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