[Wikipedia-l] Do we really need a Sifter project?

[Erik Moeller]

There have been long discussions about having a separate "Sifter" project  
which publishes selected revisions of existing Wikipedia articles that are  
believed to be accurate and complete. Such a Sifter project would exist  
alongside Wikipedia under a different name. Similarly, I have proposed a  
system for certifying articles within Wikipedia.

Both may not be necessary.

The German and the English Wikipedia currently use a quite clever process  
for selecting the so-called "Brilliant Prose" articles, the best of  
Wikipedia, so to speak. Articles are first added to a "Brilliant Prose  
Candidates" page, and if there are no objections within a week, they are  
added to the Brilliant Prose directory. If there are objections, they have  
to be resolved in some way.

This alone is already a kind of certification process, but it lacks one  
component that the Sifter project provides, namely, the establishment of  
trust by only linking to "safe" revisions of an article. This could be  
integrated into the Brilliant Prose process relatively easily.

In the article footer (where the license stuff is), there could be a  
"permalink" to the current revision of the article, which would simply be  
a link with a timestamp like in the article history. When an article is  
added to BP, this permalink would be used instead of a normal wiki-link.  
Furthermore, the BP page itself would be protected, and only sysops would  
actually add or remove articles from the BP candidates list to the BP  
page. Similarly to the "Votes for Deletion" page, sysops would simply  
carry out the requests of the community.

I would personally prefer if a process was in place that if a consensus  
cannot be reached within a timeframe, the page is added to a list of
"Current negotiations", where again, for a period of 7 days, people would  
be invited to suggest compromises and if that *also* fails, a vote is held  
on the matter. This is to avoid problems like on the VfD page, where  
sysops are given quite a lot of room for interpretation if a "consensus"  
has been reached, and pages often linger without a decision for days or  
even weeks.

The last component that might be necessary to make this work is an  
associated WikiProject to organize the reviewing process. This is simply a  
matter of organization.

The advantages of this approach vs. a separate Sifter project:
* no separate brand to the Wikipedia brand, no separate community
* feedback from all Wikipedians, not just those specializing in the  
discipline in question -- besides being complete and accurate, articles  
also must be reasonably well written and easy to understand
* establishes trust in Wikipedia
* simple, easy to use and completely open
* requires only one change to the software (permalinks), which is useful  
anyway for external authors trying to provide a permanent reference to the  
revision of the Wikipedia article they cite
* Does not encourage the establishment of any POV in the selected  
revisions:
   In a Sifter project, people might just make some last minute changes  
and then put the revision that contains these changes on the separate  
site, knowing full well that the changes won't survive on the Wikipedia,  
whereas in this model, changes would have to survive the Wikipedia  
consensus process, so it works with existing NPOV guidelines

One possible disadvantage I see is that it might be harder to "launch"  
this project -- when there's a new separate project there's always the  
associated excitement, whereas a new WikiProject might not arouse the same  
level of interest. On the other hand, if we get too much interest, the  
candidate page might get too long, and we would have to split it up into  
different categories. Both are not unsolvable problems.

What do you think? If we do this, I think we should basically put every  
brilliant prose article that hasn't gone through this process in the new  
queue, just in case some of them might not be as brilliant (anymore) as  
the person who originally added them thought.

Regards,

Erik