[Wikipedia-l] The academic approach: All contributions initially appear anonymous and are voted on by a community of "curators"

[Brian]

I would like to discuss an approach that is a modification of the way
Scholarpedia works. I am very conservative in my views of modifying the way
things already work. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I
think this approach has some relevance.

The idea is that all contributions go into a status pending bin. They
furthermore appear anonymous until they are actually accepted. Registered
users can sign up as "curators" to as many articles as they like, and they
are allowed to vote as to whether or not that contribution is accepted.
Because the suggested text appears anonymous at first, it will be judged on
its actual merits rather than ad hominem. After it has been accepted it
shows up in the history log with the author's user name, if they have one.

This follows the idea that we want more edits on lower quality pages and
fewer edits on higher quality pages. The number of edits per page increases
faster than the number of pages. This means that low quality pages are
becoming high quality faster than we can add new ones. Thus, this approach
is relevant for articles that have already achieved a high degree of
maturity. For example, those few thousand that have been classified by the
Wikipedia Editorial Team as either FA, A, GA and possibly B.

Because we slow down the rate of change of these articles (but do not stop
it), they are only likely to get better and not worse. We sometimes see a
phenomenon where a featured article will lose featured status. That's a sad
sign that good articles change too fast relative to their maturity. This
also encourages editors to think about their contributions, and also to
contribute to articles that are not already mature.

I would be interested in hearing what other Wikipedians think about this
approach. What are the downsides and what are the upsdies that I did not
cover?

Cheers,
Brian Mingus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alterego