[Wikipedia-l] Regards marking article revisions as stable

[J.L.W.S. The Special One]

I once suggested permanently semi-protecting all featured articles.

2007/4/13, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com>:
> I understand that this is a planned feature for the MediaWiki software.
>
> I heard recently that a co-founder of Wikipedia has become highly
> dissatisfied with it on account of it containing so many factual errors that
> it was useless (and beyond repair), and he's quite right - this is a major
> issue that needs to be addressed. Obviously, the ability to mark
> revisions is the perfect solution. If there was a way to pick out a revision
> as being error-free (I assume, synonymous with "stable"), Wikipedia could
> potentially progress towards being an academically-citable encyclopedia.
>
> I was just wondering who would feasibly *do* the marking as a stable
> revision? Obviously if this can be done by any users then there will be no
> advantage to it (as just the same liability toward inserting errors will
> transfer into a liability towards marking stable revisions which aren't
> actually stable). If you restrict it to registered users then there will
> still be no advantage, as even long-time registered users often vandalise
> and get things wrong. If you restrict it to admins then there will be too
> few of them.
>
> The real problem is that it will take proper peer-reviewing - by experts -
> to really mark an article as "stable" in the sense of containing none of the
> errors and mistakes that caused the aforementioned co-founder to give up on
> Wikipedia. Obviously this is because any average editor (even an admin) is
> not necessarily qualified to declare an article error-free. Certainly, if
> nothing else, it will take expert-reviewing to bring an article up to
> "citable" standards.
>
> So how do we currently suppose this will all work? Will the Foundation hire
> experts to check articles? Will we rely on expert volunteers contacting the
> Foundation so that they can be given "expert" accounts that can mark stable
> revisions? Or will we just allow long-time trusted editors to mark versions
> as stable, which leaves us in the same position of not knowing whether the
> article is *mistakenly* stable or not?
>
> One feasible way I can see this as working is defining an arbitrary amount,
> say 100, that has to be reached for an article to become stable. If one
> person marks a revision as stable, it gets +1, and if they are a more
> trusted editor (been around for longer, done more major non-reverted edits)
> then it may get +5. If someone marks it as unstable it gets -5 (weighting
> towards holding back). And so on. Then if the article reaches 100 it becomes
> stable. This method roughly solves the problem of there being vandal or
> mistaken stable articles, but assumes that one revision of an article will
> stick around for long enough to be evaluated in this manner. Will we have to
> freeze the page after an admin puts it into "evaluation mode", or perhaps
> set it aside into a subsidiary page where it is evaluated, after that
> revision has been nominated for Stable Revision Evaluation? Obviously this
> is all a very tricky issue because we're dealing with a wiki!
>
> I was just wondering what people thought of these issues, and what plans
> there are, if there are any.
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