[WikiEN-l] stable versions

[Anthony]

On 9/9/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
> > On 9/9/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> >> Stable versions doesn't have to do anything visible if the default is
> >> for people to see the most recent version rather than the one marked
> >> stable. Enable it, let people noodle around figuring out the procedures
> >> for what to mark, and if after a while the resulting version marking
> >> looks good maybe then make it the default anon view.
> >
> > The thing is, if stable versions don't have to do anything visible,
> > then the developers don't have to implement anything in the first
> > place.  People can just stick a note on the talk page for an article
> > saying "I declare
> > [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hey_Ya%21&oldid=156732871
> > version 156732871] to be stable" and other people can say "*I agree"
> > or "*what are you high?" or whatever.
>
> But once this has been tried, assuming enough people actually follow
> this procedure to give meaningful results, what then?

Then convince the devs to accept a patch making stable versions the
default non-logged-in page.

> The software
> doesn't "understand" what those links in the talk pages mean so there's
> nowhere to go in terms of expanding Wikipedia's functionality based on
> it. You need software to be able to do things like have a "show stable
> version first" as a user preference, or to create a stable-version-only
> database dump.
>
If the information was at all organized (some sort of template system,
for instance), it'd be quite easy to use it to create a
stable-version-only database dump.  "Enable it, let people noodle
around figuring out the procedures for what to mark, and if after a
while the resulting version marking looks good", then work on
importing the information into the database.  I imagine choosing a
stable version is going to take some time.  If 1000 stable versions
can be chosen over the next month and it takes 10 seconds to import
each result into the database, that's less than 3 hours of work
importing the information into the db.

> And besides, the basic point of my complaint is that after years of
> people talking about stable versions absolutely _nothing_ has been
> implemented

This doesn't seem accurate.  See for instance this thread:
http://www.nabble.com/Stable-article-versions-t3656072.html

"The developers working on this feature [stable versions] have it
implemented on a test server right now."

At the same time, I can't figure out just what it is that they're
talking about.  Erik Möller and P.Birken are listed as the people to
contact for more info.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Review

Maybe that?

And as you pointed out, Featured Articles get linked.  And so do Good
Articles.  So combine the 1591 Featured Articles with the 2857 Good
Articles, and we've got a good candidate for the stable version of
4448 articles.