[WikiEN-l] assessing

[Surreptitiousness]

David Gerard wrote:
> I think the shock was realising this is the product. Yes, that live
> working draft is the actual product. And this may actually be a
> feature.
>
> Distributions of Wikipedia content turn out to be secondary - the
> working site turns out to be the actual product.
>
> Flaged revs all through would separate "draft" and "public" copies,
> but at the expense of the motivational effects of the working draft
> being live and public.
>
> There is no "inished". It's an eternal present.
>   

These are all good points I agree with. I hadn't actually considered the 
point about flagged revs, probably because I don't actually understand 
as yet what flagged revs are.  I think I'll only understand once they 
actually happen, but in my head they're a bit like the yellow bar on the 
new page patrol, and you only get to see content in the yellow bar 
version of the page if you have that secret power turned on. Or 
something. This is probably wildly inaccurate and yet staggeringly close 
to actuality.  Yes, the article will no longer be a working draft. 
Blimey, this really is a big change.  Now I understand why I saw you on 
newsnight. Hmmm.  So if the page is no longer a working draft, what does 
that mean for the consensus by editing method we've utilised until now? 
Is this why there is talk of 20 000 new editors needed, because there'll 
be a page like recent changes and we need people to sit there and 
manually sign off on every edit?  I think from what I can make out 
certain groups of users are already signed off?  Damn, if only my german 
was better I'd go see how it works. And this is important to the point 
we need to make it work, isn't it? Out of curiousity, is this similar to 
the switch IMDB made a few years back? Or am I misremembering that you 
used to be able to have more interactivity at that site? Sorry, this has 
all been done to death somewhere else, I'm sure, but it tends to start 
containing lots of words I don't grok like flagged and revisions and 
other stuff, rather than getting at the general philosophy and the 
general impact.