On 4/22/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Jeff Raymond wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 22/04/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Personally, I think that once stable versions are finally implemented many of the major deletionism issues that have been going on for years will fade away. That's the change I'd really like to see, it'll make Wikipedia safer for work-in-progress again.
HELL YES.
Man, that's going to be a showdown of epic proportions. I'll again idly note that there's some significant opposition to the idea of article stability, and nothing appears to be happening to address that.
I'm hoping that stable versions won't increase _article_ stability, and in fact I think it'll actually make articles easier to change.
My own feeling on the matter is that this is probably wishful thinking.
As an example, I've been involved in a bit of a dispute over at [[Transhumanism]] where an editor who's done a lot of work on the article has now declared it to be "finished", and has been rather aggressive in reverting further changes because he believes new additions that aren't up to the same standards as existing material reduce the overall quality of the article. With stable version flagging, we could mark the version that got FA status and then people could work freely on the article without fear of disruption until a new and improved FA-quality version ensued.
To use your example to explain my feeling on the matter, we *already* can mark the version that got FA status. In fact, it's already marked. If you click on [show] next to the featured article message, you can see quite plainly that http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transhumanism&oldid=53177243 is when the article received FA status.
Could we show by default the featured article and make people click through to the work in progress? Yes, although I'm sure it's debatable whether or not we should. If we did that, would this appease the person who's agressive in reverting changes which s/he feels is making the article worse? Probably not. Even if so, are there that many featured articles in the first place? No, so then you've gotta have good articles, and semi-good articles, and non-vandalised articles, etc. Could this be implemented well? Probably, though it would take an awful lot of time and energy to maintain even after the technical parts are implemented. Will it be implemented well? I doubt it.
Anthony