Fastfission wrote:
Without an over-arching editor who stamps "DONE" on it, it will never stop. Since all users get to be that editor, it seems unlikely that it will ever truly stabilize. Even relatively obscure topics draw new people and editing to them after awhile, and it is usually for the better, I think.
I agree, but I think we can make things easier for the person who *does* want something relatively stable, either to read or to print up in books, without compromising the in-progress nature of the work.
There are already people who can, for certain classes of articles, tell you what's good and what isn't. I even know who to ask in some subject areas. If I really wanted to make a narrow, say, "Math articles of Wikipedia" book, I could probably hire 3-4 active Wikipedians to sort things out for me.
I don't think it would be impossible to have some of that information maintained in a more organized way. Basically the questions that needs to be answered are: 1) Is this article reasonably decent? 2) If no, is it because it's being rewritten or in flux, and if so is there a previous version that's decent?
For many articles, the answers are obvious to anyone who is vaguely familiar with the subject matter, reads the talk page, and skims the history. So we somehow need to collect that obvious information and make it available to readers and downstream reusers. The specifics are fairly tricky, though, and I think some software would be required. I'd be willing to help out on that, but I don't have the free time or expertise to design and implement such a system myself (or I would've done it by now). Any ideas on how to get something like that jumpstarted?
-Mark