David Gerard wrote:
On 27/08/06, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
http://news.com.com/Can+German+engineering+fix+Wikipedia/2100-1038_3-6108495... 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