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

[Ulrich Fuchs]

> And Wikipedia is the content development area -
> that is a serious and very important thing. Without it there would be no
> content.

With an "official" cannibalization of Wikipedia arcticles for Nupedia articles 
there would be no content - people do not like it to write without being 
acknowledged. They get this acknowledment right now by supporting the free 
encyclopedia idea *directly*. I bet most of the contributors will have a very 
bad feeling about not doing the "final" thing any more, but being just the 
idiots who do all the work for some guys and girls at Nupedia who will be the 
"gods" which - at the end of the day - decide rather authorically what is 
good content and what is nonsens.

If you want the Wikipedia volunteers to keep volunteering, you must keep the 
"stable" versions under the Wikipedia label.

I say stable, not "approved". There could be a formalized, but still open 
process for building "stable" versions. You can start with an excellent 
article, put it into a sperate namespace or whatever, and than apply an 
important copyediting rule to it: "No new content may be added here, but 
content may be deleted". There are clever editors without degrees in the 
particular area that can do copyediting by throwing out everything that 
doesn't sound reasonable to them.  Editors with a degree in the area are free 
to join in, of course and prevent the stable article from having wrong 
content by simply throwing it out! One can use the discussion pages for 
dabating which sentences will be thrown out and so on.  If no new content may 
be added, there is a guarantee that this process will not work the same way 
like normal editing, where a lot of "arguing" takes place in the articles. If 
no new argument may be added, the article will shrink to the undisputed facts 
and gain quality.

After some time of copyediting there would be a freeze for the article and a 
vote, if it's ok to be declared "stable". Such a stable version could be 
merged back to the in-process-article, all the arguing there takes place 
again, and the cycle restarts.

Uli