Wikipedia talk:Stable versions proposal

—preceding unsigned comment by JWSchmidt (talk • contribs)

first talk

At what point can any article be trusted to be "completed" and thus publication-worthy? Who then would we trust to update it? violet/riga (t) 14:10, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

it has to adhere to publication standards like how britannica or encarta would do. plus it can always be republished. -- Zondor 14:14, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's not clear: is this the same idea as having a "stable" vs "development" version of an article, or are you instead arguing that once a page becomes published, no version is then available for editing on Wikipedia? — Matt Crypto 15:06, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I am proposing the former: stable vs development. stable or published is not editable. development or normal articles are. -- Zondor 15:10, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Conditional Support

I like the idea of having articles reach "publication" status; it could be considered the end of the line for article development. However, I do not entirely agree to the concept of page protection, as it is the concept of Wikipedia to quickly fix something when something changes. For example, if all the apples of the world were to spontaneously turn purple, we can be the first to say so. However, you have a point. My idea is that a subpage of the same article could be made, where people can freely edit the content. Whenever it's important to update the main article (like my purple apple example above), we can move over the content to the main article. —MESSEDROCKER (talk) 18:05, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

so yes, it means you do have full support. -- Zondor 18:33, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If a published article would have no editable version, then I strongly oppose this. Though something as described by Messedrocker above is more workable, I'd like to see it implemented on a test project - or at least described clearly.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 23:46, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Publication" -- misnomer?

I think the word "publication" is a bit of a misnomer, as, at least in the scheme proposed, "published" articles would be available on Wikipedia just the same as "unpublished articles". Both types are published on the web, and not in print. — Matt Crypto 18:59, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

being published does not mean it has to be in print. both can be in print also. yes, both are on the web but they can have different status. published vs. normal = checked+protected vs. editable -- Zondor 19:15, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I know, but all pages on Wikipedia are "published" on the Web, whether they're new stubs or Featured Articles. I'm just saying that the word "published" is a poor term to differentiate between a "stable" and "development" branch of an article, because all Wikipedia articles are published in the online sense, and most are unpublished in the hardcopy sense. — Matt Crypto 19:46, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

DIY

Why not do it yourself? Make your own encyclopaedia website, made up of Wikipedia articles that you think are good enough. I believe the information is free to copy, right? If we protect a page then the article is never going to improve, things change with time. Even Britannica has mistakes! Gerard Foley 01:19, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We don't have to divide. Strength in unity. -- Zondor 06:50, 27 November 2005 (UTC) -- Zondor 06:50, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:WikiReader. Allready being done. --Stbalbach 23:13, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Emphatic no!!!!! Lock pages? Then Wikipedia would have failed. What a horrible idea! User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:03, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Never going to improve? Did you fully read the project page? The proposed system is an extension of the existing system and will not compromise it. The locked pages are on the side, a different namespace called "Published" or "Publication". If the new system is in place, you would hardly feel anything has been different, as all articles are continued to be freely editable. -- Zondor 06:30, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Any user reading the published version instead of the active version will be 1 (or probably 0.5 or less, but still something) less user to see (and therfore have a chance of editing) the current version, so to the degree this suggestion is a success and widely used, it will slow down wikipedia's growth. I therefore stronly oppose this idea. Amaurea 22:23, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Over my dead body. It's a joke to go asking if the authors of articles want them to be "published" when there's not the vaguest sign of consensus to go ahead with this at all. Ambi 22:53, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

no one has claimed there is full consensus. this is only a stage in gathering one. -- Zondor 23:07, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I did read the project page. Never was probably the wrong word, but it will make it harder to fix small mistakes. I like the idea of a reliable version of Wikipedia, but this is not it. Gerard Foley 17:06, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what you're all excited about. Please don't have a knee-jerk reaction or take it out of context when someone mentions protection or locked pages. There is an editable version - it is there. -- Zondor 17:57, 28 November 2005 (UTC) look at it this way, the protected pages being introduced is not a wiki whatsoever so you don't need to be so cliched and stamp it Meta:Anti-wiki. let's call it something else like static pages for publishing wiki pages -- Zondor 02:17, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No I actually didn't read the proposal fully, I was thinking of something else (I don't know what). I was also a bit drunk when I wrote the original response. Talk of this has been going on for years, see Wikipedia:Pushing to 1.0 started by Jimbo Wales 2 years ago. Gerard Foley 06:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the fact that it is harder to fix small mistakes, it would be harder because publications are a different beast to wikis. Wikipedia's and yours would be put on the on the line. Published versions are thus favourable because it has benefits of being reliable. -- Zondor 02:31, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Namespace

There could even be a wikipedia.org/published/ as opposed to wikipedia.org/wiki/. - Fredrik | t c 12:37, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

that's a good one. the way we are editing articles freely now should be the main centre of attention. i expect people to keep continually publishing their freely editable wiki article as often as possible. this way we maintain our wiki openess, yet we can be traditional that people are comfortable with. this environment would be very favourable to those who want quality and accurate information like serious researchers and schools. indeed, using the published namespace would be a little ugly. however, it would be great if they can still interlink with each other. -- Zondor 20:34, 27 November 2005 (UTC) it would make sense to move it to /published instead of remaining at /wiki because if they are all protected, they wouldn't be wiki anymore. -- Zondor 20:48, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Who's publishing?

All these ideas are interesting, but who's doing the publishing, what kind of distribution will it have? There are already Reader projects, in which individuals on Wikipedia publish articles. This page "looks" like somthing official (ie. there is money being spent by the wiki non-profit), but is there accutual official monetary support behind it, or is this just a volunter "project"? --Stbalbach 23:11, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The name of this page is very unhelpful: this is a proposal for a "stable" vs "development" version of articles, and not a plan for print publishing. — Matt Crypto 23:21, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

All wikipedians would be doing the publishing by consensus. An official publishing house could be set up by the board. Nothing needs to be printed or spend too much money yet because they can all be online (electronic publishing). It isn't official and has potential to be, however, it is closely tied with Wikipedia:1.0 which is more official as initiated by Jimbo. It is still gathering consensus being a {{proposal}} and all. Its a little different with this proposal because articles can be published one by one starting soon. -- Zondor 23:22, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Needs dedicated software support

I think this proposal would require new features in the MediaWiki software. A new namespace is unlikely to be sufficient. Let me describe what I have in mind, and I hope you'll see why this would be awkward to implement on top of the existing infrastructure.

Suppose Wikipedia was divided into two zones: the published/frozen/1.0 etc. zone, and the editable/hot/development zone (the latter corresponding to the current system).

If you're in the frozen zone and you follow a wiki link, you should be taken to another frozen zone article if one exist, and if there is none yet, you should be taken to the corresponding development zone article. I.e., some sort of fall-back mechanism should be in place.(This can only be done in the current system by keeping an explicit inventory of published articles and updating links that point to published/frozen pages.)

The two zones should be visually distinct, perhaps by using different style sheets.

Arguably the frozen zone wouldn't need talk pages or user pages, and consist only of a subset of the namespaces (main/article, image, portal, category). Categories would be problematic, because they are created dynamically. If a given frozen category contains only articles from the frozen zone, it might end up looking quite empty. But if categories are shared among the two zones, this could easily lead to confusion and/or inconsistencies (e.g. what if a frozen article is in category C and its corresponding development version is not?).

The main reason why talk pages shouldn't exist in the frozen zone is for everyone's sanity: we don't want to treat the frozen version as a branch/fork with separate development. (It's doable in theory, but can be quite messy and confusing in practice.)

Each page in the frozen zone should point to the corresponding development version of the article, perhaps even to the exact revision that got frozen/published. This would require different instructions, and "edit this page" would get a bit more complicated.

I think we should work out a few concrete use cases for this proposal and then ask for developer assistance. To a large extent it's a technical challenge. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 01:22, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

the exact needs of the dedicated software support needs more thought. however, a precursor system like the first system using namespaces can used initially to put this into practice to confirm the usability. -- Zondor 03:59, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So how should links inside the "Published:" (or "Stable:") namespace be treated? I think the most consistent would be to allow only links to other "Published:" pages, meaning that this namespace will be at first very incomplete. But if you can get enough people on board and manage to get an approval procedure that is both fairly strict and approves 100 pages/day, this problem will eventually go away. (Published:redlinks could also provide a disclaimer and link to standard wiki page (as a later software feature), but should not link directly). Actually I think the setup for the approval procedure and getting enough people here is the hardest part of this project. Kusma (talk) 05:13, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The other problem is that a separate namespace will essentially just create a fork of existing articles. Those articles would have to be protected, and their talk pages redirected to the development version's talk page. This is rather tedious work which should be automated. Next, Wikipedia isn't just articles. What about images, templates, and categories? The frozen/development distinction is really orthogonal to the namespace issue. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 05:54, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

dont protect, use permanent link to cite

I dont think its necessary to do this, as information keeps changing. For instance if you protected say the article on United States of America how do you update it when there is a new president etc.? If you want something from which to cite, use the Permanent Link over there at the bottom of the lefthand column which gives the link to each version of a page. Maybe a list of permanent links which are seen as the 'best' versions of a page would work? Astrokey44 02:40, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That is similar to Wikipedia:Baseline revision. Citing a particular version at any given time is not good enough as any other versions in time. This proposal involves a big fussy quality assurance check. Plus, republising as often as possible is encouraged. yes, we can do away with protecting and go with citing oldid's as long as there is an explict quality check. though using a cite link is not so proper, no? -- Zondor 03:41, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How about some sort of list of articles the moment they became featured, so you could have a page that said something like "this lists wikipedia's pages on the revision date when they became a featured article" - something like: Tom Brinkman became a featured article on 10 August 2005, this is the revision showing when it was featured: [1] , maybe move them to a different link something like wikipedia:featured revision/Tom Brinkman, so that it stands out from just any old version of an article? Astrokey44 05:55, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this would be a good idea. You would want to provide a notification on the normal article to point to the featured article. eg. In Tom Brinkman it should say For the published featured article, see Wikipedia:Featured revision/Tom Brinkman. And do you mind that Wikipedia:Featured revision/Tom Brinkman should be protected so that it will remain the exact version? When using the particular oldid, there should be consensus that this is a publication worthy version that is good quality and accurate comparable to Britannica and Encarta. However, does "featured" mean its publication worthy? I chose the word "Publication", though loaded but a strong word to indicate so. Wikipedia:Featured revision/Tom Brinkman looks a little ugly. Why not put it as Publication:Tom Brinkman? Or even better: http://en.wikipedia.org/publication/Tom_Brinkman ? -- Zondor 06:36, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. Locking or moving articles won't fly. The marker idea (a given version is acclaimed as the "published" version) is probably more workable, but that requires software. Presumably the "published" version is in the version history; version URLs are stable, so we just need a link to that somewhere - David Gerard 14:14, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Typically, when you go through the version history, a particular version, considered as marked for example, will not necessarily reflect that old version because the latest version of images and templates would be used. unless the mediawiki software needs to accomodate this by storing the oldid of the image or template or store the total raw data of that particular version. -- Zondor 15:30, 28 November 2005 (UTC) plus there can be complications with templates, categories or images being deleted or maybe when moved. -- Zondor 15:40, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Templates are also a problem for the article validation feature. I've put a suggestion on m:Article validation possible problems that old versions also try to pull in the relevant version of the template, or be stored with the version numbers of any templates. I predict that will be far, far more acceptable than making any article in the main Wikipedia non-editable - David Gerard 15:36, 28 November 2005 (UTC) from [2] -- Zondor 17:14, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So what you're saying is that the article needs to be protected (under the "Published" namespace or whatever) and the relevant templates and images need to be as well? That makes for a more difficult job. violet/riga (t) 21:24, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

this is concerning another "publishing" system or Meta:Article validation. -- Zondor 02:00, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Name

I'm not so sure of I like the name "publication" for what is essentially a "frozen" version. However, I like the idea. Some version of an article could be declared "good" and then be moved to the protected "frozen" version, while the standard version continues to change and be updated. The "frozen" version should only be updated every couple of months, or when something important happens (e.g. government changes), and changes from the standard page be incorporated. Note that an endorsement of specific version similar to a freeze already seems to exist for spoken articles (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia). It might be useful to ask there how the version to be recorded is chosen. Kusma (talk) 02:41, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Publication" implies quality and protection. "Frozen" implies protection only. Britannica and Encarta have "Publication". Wikipedia only has "Frozen". Schools prefer "Publication" over "Frozen" which means schools prefer Britannica and Encarta over Wikipedia. -- Zondor 03:46, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I see. You are right and the name should definitely not be "Frozen" since that doesn't sound good from an outside point of view. I agree that "Publication" is superior (not sure if optimal). Kusma (talk) 03:53, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But by designation one version as "publication", this creates the wrong impression that other articles somehow haven't been "published" yet. What we really need is a mechanism that's slightly more conservative than editing a page and having one's changes be immediately visible to the whole world. Ideally, the visible version of a page (the one visible to everyone when they look up an article) would lag behind the most recent revision just enough to discourage vandals, but not enough to frustrate serious contributors. I'll predict that we'll see a drop in silly vandalism if edits don't have an immediate effect but require some amount of additional review. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 06:03, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

the impression is right - articles that have not been published does not deserve the title - it has not been through quality assurance. -- Zondor 06:16, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Zondor, "published" doesn't mean high quality. It means "to prepare and issue for public distribution or sale". All content on Wikipedia is published, by definition. — Matt Crypto 15:54, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Publish" can serve another meaning that we want to tell the world we recommend you to use this stable version because it has been quality checked rather than the one we are working on at the moment. -- Zondor 02:02, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a wise idea to take a word that's generally understood to have one meaning, and reuse it with a different intended meaning. It'll only confuse people. Alternatives include the "stable" vs "development" terminology. — Matt Crypto 10:07, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What Matt said. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 10:29, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds ok as long as editing continues on the 'normal' article - but how would you determine who could edit the 'frozen' version, and when? I suppose it would mean admin-only editing of the frozen version, although there might be alot of people unhappy about that Astrokey44 05:58, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would like a proposal such as "Editing continues normally on the standard wiki page, but every now and then a good version is decided upon (at most once per month) and moved to the "Published:" namespace by an admin." I think administrators should not edit these pages, just update them by replacing with a new standard wikipedia version when decided so at Wikipedia:Requests for Publication/Updates. Kusma (talk) 06:21, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a good idea to me. --JK the unwise 15:39, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Do we really want this?

IMHO, there's no need for any drastic measures to accomplish what you want, especially not freezing pages. All you need to do is to make a template which basically says "This article has a version we think is good, click here to see it." which would appear on those articles that have them. Watching the changes to the tag will be as hard as watching any other category, but a list of links to good versions and a bot should probably manage.

But the question is, do we really want this at this point? Who will decide when it's good enough? A committee of experts appointed in some way? Do we have the required infrastructure for checking credentials? Or do we just duplicate FA procedures and go on to publish articles which we claim can be held up to standards of professionaly reviewed encyclopedias and hope for the best? If we get just a few wrong, we'll be ridiculed for years. It's not that they don't make mistakes, but we're still the underdog here and more vulnerable to damage from gaffes. Zocky 16:10, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we do actually. Nobody is saying that we freeze the main articles, no indeedy. What we have been (rightly) critized for is instability and inaccuracy. Having a page frozen in its own namespace is a good idea. If problems occur, then we can add a tag saying that we don't want to use this as the frozen page anymore and then we can move on to the next good revision. - Ta bu shi da yu 10:49, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The main version of an article is the one most people read, not the one we declare to be the "main version". If most people read a frozen version of an article, essentially a non-wiki version of the article, then those people probably won't participate in the wiki process. What makes a wiki special is that everybody can change the pages. If we change that into "everybody can change some behind-the-scenes article which most people don't really bother to look at", then we will not only lose most edits (the ones from average readers), but also our main avenue for recruiting new editors. Wikipedia has grown this quickly this large, and gotten the astounding amount of quality material is has precisely because of the way it has worked up to now. Using static versions of articles sounds like an excellent way for wikipedia to suffocate itself. Amaurea 22:38, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Do we really want this at this point?

It is certainly needed if Wikipedia wishes to compete with Britannica and Encarta in quality and accurateness. Wikipedia is built quickly without the burden of accuracy. It serves a different market compared with the traditional encyclopaedias who target schools. If the community does not want be known as a reliable source then so be it.

Who will decide when it's good enough?

Wikipedia:Consensus

A committee of experts appointed in some way? Do we have the required infrastructure for checking credentials?

The level of content, quality and accurateness is a function of its Wikipedians. If we have expert Wikipedians in this area then we will have good articles in the same area. That's the best we hope to do unless we hire some experts.

Or do we just duplicate FA procedures and go on to publish articles which we claim can be held up to standards of professionaly reviewed encyclopedias and hope for the best?

The featured article process is very similar to Requests for Publication and may come together to some arrangement.

If we get just a few wrong, we'll be ridiculed for years.

Wikipedia is full of wrongs or pretend it does not have any. This is why Britannica and Encarta are favoured.

-- Zondor 16:44, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I dont think we have to beat Britannica and Encarta at everything. Lets just do what we do best and leave them to do what they do best. We're not trying to take over the world here --- Astrokey44 00:59, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft Encarta has already started trying to beat us: noticed their new "edit this article" feature? -- Zondor 01:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is a shockingly bad idea. Trollderella 20:48, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Care to elaborate? - Ta bu shi da yu 12:24, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please stop spamming talk pages

While my initial opinion was that this is a good proposal, if people keep spamming talk pages with requests to "publish", especially talk pages of non-featured articles and while this proposal is still being discussed, I for one will turn into an ardent opponent. -- Jmabel | Talk 17:58, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Non featured articles are acceptable. Namely, Wikipedia:Good articles or Wikipedia:Standard articles which are v0.5 or usable as described in Wikipedia:1.0. -- Zondor 18:00, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That reply really missed the point. I applaud your efforts to get your proposal off the ground, but spamming various talk pages is not the correct way to go about things. violet/riga (t) 21:19, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Does FA work, anyway?

Before becoming too enthusiastic about how well the Featured Article program works, maybe we should review a sample of the articles and see whether they were really all up to scratch.

For example, list of countries with nuclear weapons became a featured list while listing Australia as a state formerly possessing nuclear weapons or programs. The entry describing Australia was also inaccurate on several details, all of them apparently from the same political source, see Talk:List of countries with nuclear weapons. The current entry is still misleading. Australia has never had a weapons program! Andrewa 18:10, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In addition many FA's became so before the standards were higher and have remained part of the FA cannon but would never pass if nominated today. Granted there are steps to de-list a FA, but it's not fun or easy to do, many weak articles remain. --Stbalbach 18:29, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Support

I support this effort, but appearently for reasons not stated on the project page: I'm hoping it'll discourage vandals and POV pushers. Mathematics is perhaps a poor example: it has a lot of peple watching it, and has a lively talk page; objectionable edits are quickly reverted. A more appropriate example might be an obscure example, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is an adequate article that has seen nothing but frequent vandalism since approximtely forever. As its talk page will attest, at least one editor left on account of this.

At least part of my interest in publication would be eliminated if WP had more reliable, more robust ways in which a group of editors could share the burden of reviewing watchlists. For example, some very fast/simple collective voting mechanism by which a regular pool of editors could note that they reviewed & agree with any given recent article change. Since "publication" would be governed by some voting process, some discusion of streamlined voting proceedures might not be inappropriate.

But perhaps this is the wrong forum in which to discuss these issues. linas 22:37, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

yes, this is a good reason. i am not sure it will alone discourage vandals but it can certainly help hedge against the risks of vandalism. -- Zondor 02:08, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It will certainly help. The John Seigenthaler Sr would be a good place to start, methinks. - Ta bu shi da yu 02:40, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A related proposal

Those of us who edit the George W. Bush article have been frustrated about the high rate of vandalism. It's probably the most frequently vandalized page on Wikipedia. From time to time some admin reacts to the problem by protecting the article, which I personally consider a bad move.

Aside from the nuisance factor, there's a concern that many readers who visit that article will access it while it's in a vandalized state. One possible solution presented at Wikipedia:Experimental vandalism protection and discussed on Wikipedia talk:Experimental vandalism protection is similar to the "publication" idea but much more limited. Once a week or so, an admin who never edits the article for substance would identify the most recent unvandalized version and save it as "George W. Bush - scrutinized" or some such. The main article would remain open for editing by anyone, even anons, just as it is now. The difference would be that it would have a note at the top mentioning that it's frequently vandalized, and that a recent nonvandalized version can be found here (wikilinking to the "scrutinized" version, which would be protected).

I favor starting with a "scrutinized" version only of George W. Bush, a highly visible article that's often vandalized. We might consider expanding it in the future.

Unlike the "publication" proposal, establishing a "scrutinized" version wouldn't address article quality issues other than vandalism. I mention it here because some people interested in Zondor's proposal might also be interested in the other one. JamesMLane 02:28, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

just a thought: hopefully without increasing Meta:Instruction creep, there could be a marker system that indicates which was the most recent scrutinised version (a little similar to Meta:Article validation). only one single marker per article. only those with high level counts or admins can change that marker. or maybe even multiple markers per article to indicate multile scrutinised versions. this wouldn't cost too much to change the mediawiki software. -- Zondor 03:14, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

One advantage to having a separate "scrutinized" version, instead of just a marker, is that, if the system seemed to be working, wikilinks in other articles could be changed to piped links, in the form [[George W. Bush - scrutinized|George W. Bush]]. That way, readers following a link would automatically reach an unvandalized version. Of course, a note on the scrutinized version would direct the reader to the editable version. JamesMLane 08:59, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Renamed

I've renamed this proposal "Stable versions", rather than "Requests for publication". As argued above, the "publication" terminology is simply incorrect. A) this proposal isn't particularly about any new form of publishing (e.g. print), and B) all Wikipedia articles are published on the Web, and this proposal doesn't change that. I suggest the "stable" versus "development" terminology — but there could be better. — Matt Crypto 12:02, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the reasoning for the move. violet/riga (t) 12:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Stable" does not imply quality and accurateness that you would get in a publication. Please find a word that does. Maybe Released version? [3] [4] Names are powerful and magical and should be chosen carefully. People would still think: "Stable? I don't want stable. I want quality and accuracy. I want a published version that you would get from Britannica and Encarta". -- Zondor 02:02, 30 November 2005 (UTC) Revised version? -- Zondor 02:11, 30 November 2005 (UTC) 1.0 versions/editions? -- Zondor 03:04, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You say that "Stable does not imply quality and accurateness that you would get in a publication". I think you have a false association of publication with quality. You can publish things of poor quality in any medium, and, of course, there are many poor Wikipedia articles that are published on the Web. So let's reassert that "published" is not a synonym for "quality" or "accuracy". Think of "published" as meaning "made public". — Matt Crypto 08:13, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. There is no inherent connection between published content and quality content. In scientific publishing, though, it's common for things to only get published after they've gone some form of peer review (and one can debate the merits, flaws, and cost of that system, but this is not the place). We do have peer review, but I don't think "stable" should necessarily mean having undergone peer review, if only for the fact that peer review is often slow. In fact, the peer review process on WP exists partly to solicit input on articles that don't have an active body of editors that collaborated in its creation. I'd guess that there is a vast number of articles out there which can be considered stable, aside from the occasional vandalism. If an article has a group of regular editors that patrol and update it, the decision of whether it's sufficiently stable and which version to pick for freezing can be pretty much left to those editors. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 12:10, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Interest in the project

I know this is at a very early stage, but I think there would need to be a massive amount of interest from the community in order for this to work properly. I see it as a poor relation to FA status, and know how the FAC process can sometimes draw too little attention. The intention is good, but I personally don't think that this solution will work in practical terms. violet/riga (t) 12:09, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think it can, but it needs to be thought through a lot better as to how it would actually work; if it were to proceed along current lines, it would very much be poor relation to FA status. Ambi 03:52, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with violet/riga and Ambi, except that I think a "poor relation to FA status" is a reasonable goal. It would involve a much lower standard than what Zondor has proposed -- something like "no factual inaccuracies, no major omissions, no misspellings or grammatical errors, no vandalisms, and no NPOV disputes". Instead of aiming for a "stable" version, it would be considered merely a "scrutinized" or "reviewed" version. It wouldn't necessarily be stable, because the reviewed version could be updated from time to time by the copying of the main article (which would remain available for open editing and which would, we hope, continue to improve). Obviously, this wouldn't accomplish all of Zondor's objectives. It would, however, require significantly less work. JamesMLane 16:12, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But that's the point. How do we know there are no factual inaccuracies? How do we know there are no major omissions? FAC does a reasonable job of achieving this, but by no means a complete one. If this is to be any different to FAC, it really does need to come to some means of solving those first two issues. Even more useful, however, would be to do this with Wikipedia 1.0 in mind, and ask two additional questions: is this important enough to go in a print distribution, and is this in the appropriate form to go in a print distribution? Ambi 16:31, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. It is best if the total combined effort, every bit of effort we have in Wikipedia (Wikipedia:Good articles, Wikipedia:Standard articles, Wikipedia:Featured articles, and others) is efficiently directed towards creating the end product, a published/stable article version. I think this proposal overlaps them or they are a subset of this proposal. There is an issue of articles achieving a status only then to be degraded over time - this proposal can prevent that. -- Zondor 04:33, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sources, for one. Lots and lots of sources, each one of them verified. See MDAC for an example. I know it's a lot of work, but that's what it would take! - Ta bu shi da yu 02:43, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

New language

perhaps its best to put these published/stable versions on a new language site (and be protected?) in order to work seamlessly with existing languages. -- Zondor 14:16, 30 November 2005 (UTC) -- Zondor 17:17, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Now you're getting towards the realms of a total Wikipedia fork. violet/riga (t) 16:46, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

it also conflicts with people's reaction to protection in wikipedia. at least a new haven can be created dedicated to protection. -- Zondor 03:24, 3 December 2005 (UTC) It shall be called Nupedia. -- Zondor 04:15, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Scaling

I think that maintaining a stable wikipedia is a worthwhile goal, but I don't think that this process would really scale to the job. If we lowered the standards to a version of an article that has no vandalism, is referenced and someone has done a quick check of its references and allow this to stand as the stable version. This could then be compared with the 'live' version every month/week/day, depending on how busy the article is, and someone (admins, regsitered users, somewhere in between?) could update the stable version accordingly and set this as the new live version. I think this would get through a lot more work than putting the whole thing to a committee and seems to perform more or less the same function. Comments, anyone? --Cherry blossom tree 23:51, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It'd be a lot of work for what, I think, could be questionable benefit; the amount of articles affected by vandalism at any one time is negligible, and any checking of references is going to slow the process right down, in which case we may as well do it properly. Ambi 00:32, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly disagree with the comments in one respect: vandalism is a large concern, even if only some of them are actually vandalised. For instance, the John Seigenthaler Sr was vandalised, and caused us a great deal of credibility problems for us. I think now is the time to start thinking of ways to show that we have more reliable and stable versions of articles. One thing is to try to remember that we're writing an encyclopedia here! - Ta bu shi da yu 02:45, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's true that checking (off-line) references would be time consuming. And I suppose anything contentious would be ironed out before then. I'd be prepared to let that drop. But if we did this by review board, even going many times faster than WP:FAC goes we'd still only have a couple of thousand in a year. I was just trying to propose something that might get through the pile a bit quicker. --Cherry blossom tree 00:44, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Not necessarily. If this was done with Wikipedia 1.0 in mind, it would not be feasible to have copies of all of every article; rather, it would just be a summary short enough to be printed. I don't think it would be nearly as hard to impose strict standards of referencing and quality on articles that really aren't that long. Ambi 00:57, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If we were looking at making stable versions of x articles to print then we could afford to take time time over it. I think we're aiming for different things, here. --Cherry blossom tree 16:38, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Based on Wikipedia:Trust model, we can have the most ratified version to be publicised and with a disclaimer. So we have a spectrum of trust in the article from Unvandalised version (as you suggest), through to Wikipedia:Standard articles, Wikipedia:Good articles, and Wikipedia:Featured articles, or more. Publicised articles then must have such an explicit disclaimer associated with it. An Unvandalised version may still have inaccurate information so the benefit is not so great. The publicised edition would need at least to achieve something like Standard articles, not high quality, but at least all is factually accurate, which is something you can present to anyone with confidence. -- Zondor 01:53, 1 December 2005 (UTC) -- Zondor 02:07, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There's no need try to scale this process to cover all of Wikipedia. If we could just publish 10000 reviewed articles on core topics, we'd have something quite good. Fredrik | t c 02:01, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly agree with Fredrik on this! Over time, we will have quite a respectable subset of Wikipedia articles. In some way, it is a good reward for those who spend a great deal of time and effort on getting articles to FAC! - Ta bu shi da yu 02:47, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

that would be a good strategy. schools don't need pokemon-cruft.-- Zondor 03:18, 1 December 2005 (UTC) Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles; Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have -- Zondor 03:27, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In any case it would be a good idea to start with a limited list of topics to be reviewed. When there is a process that works, expanding it to the whole of Wikipedia could still make sense in the future (and so schools will be able to enjoy some perfect Pokemon articles). Kusma (talk) 03:35, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Self-stabilization

Here is a half-baked idea seeking bakers. Large parts of Wikipedia have been very stable. High quality sentences, paragraphs, sections, and occasionally whole articles go untouched for long periods of time. In some cases this is due to lack of interest, but in other cases it is due to stability, i.e. consensus among editors. The idea is that the older text is, the harder it should be to change. The half-baked part of it is that there needs to be a continuously variable stickiness operator that prevents radical changes. The only thing I can think of to handle it might be a tree of edits that propagate upward. People could surf Wikipedia seeing the most stable content by default, or see any level of the tree. Leaf nodes on the tree would work their way up the tree into the article of they stand the test of time. So a leaf sentence about G W Bush's parentage, that might be constantly changed by vandals, would never rise up the tree and would never make up to the topmost level, i.e. never modify the stable article that almost all people would see. On the other hand, a paragraph in an article about some aspect of the French Revolution might be modified by an expert and then reviewed by dozens of editors. As time goes by and it rises in the tree, it would be scrutinized by more and more eyeballs. The longer it passes muster, the greater distance between it and any sudden vandalism which would become a new leaf. The longer it passes muster, also, the closer it would get to being part of the stable article. Part of the baking needed for this idea is a way to make articles responsive to edits, especially current events, or highly verifiable info such as fresh census data. Your thoughts, please. Hu 02:30, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I was always under the impression that the law of entropy states that all systems tend toward chaos. I feel that we're a bit like this. I don't believe we are constantly self-stabilising. - Ta bu shi da yu 11:54, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You might want to discuss this at Wikipedia talk:Stable versions. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:25, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Erm, you do know that you're referring to this page, right? Ambi 07:34, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - Ooops! Running through too many talk pages in too rapid succession pickles the brain. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:29, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how the mechanics of this would work, exactly. English prose is not very amenable to having parts missing, or mixing and matching different versions. Especially given how a single word or sentence can completely invert the meaning of the surrounding text. The simple passage of time is not a good metric for reliability, as neglected articles sit around for a long time without being touched. I actually find that articles that have seen a high number of edits tend to be more reliable (except in the case of edit wars). I think you could probably assign a reliability metric to an article (and display that in thermometer or through colorization or something) and then note which parts of it have changed recently (perhaps by colorizing them differently). -- Beland 05:42, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Giving this a shot

I've unblanked the CUPS page and put it back on the stable versions page. I've done this mainly so we can play around with it to see what people come up with. - Ta bu shi da yu 11:52, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Since this is part of a general exploration of the idea of stable versions, I think we should have the CUPS example (while having made it clear that this is an example of how the system could work). — Matt Crypto 12:01, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. This is why I added that italicised text to the subarticle. - Ta bu shi da yu 12:08, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and for the record: I much regret the "get stuffed" edit summary. - Ta bu shi da yu 12:09, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not entirely sure why Ambi is so insistent that the CUPS example cannot be included. This entire proposal is speculative, and there is no assertion that this is an agreed on process. Therefore, I don't see why the CUPS example is so objectionable, particularly if it's explicitly identified as an example of how this sort of process could be implemented. — Matt Crypto 12:29, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's why I'm doing it! I believe that the reason Ambi is against it is because "nothing has been decided". Well, nothing has been decided because nothing has been done! I think we should at least trial ideas. We could talk and talk about this forevermore, but at the end of the day it will mean nothing gets done. The subarticle isn't affecting anyone, so there was never any need to blank it, and even less reason to remove it from this webpage. I've just reverted again, I encourage Ambi to use the talk page to discuss why she is doing this. - Ta bu shi da yu 12:31, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What are we trialling? All you've put up is a nomination process that nearly exactly mimics FAC and ignores practically all the discussion on this page. I understand that you're very keen to get things underway, but creating a clone of FAC just so we can get some form of this page working expediently really doesn't help anyone. Ambi 13:03, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I have further subdivided the example subarticle into mandatory and option areas to focus on. And I'm not ignoring discussion, I'm more tinkering with ideas. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:23, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

See below. Adding criteria doesn't much help us - it's still creating a process that's very similar to FAC, and I'm really not sure the "best of Wikipedia" option is the best way of using stable versions on Wikipedia. There's at least five other ways we could go about this, all of which would markedly differ from what we already have and could serve a really useful purpose. Ambi 13:31, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What the heck is the CUPS page ?? linas 18:21, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sections to use in the subarticle

Trying a few things I feel we need for a stable article in the subarticle:

Structural
Accuracy
Objectivity (Neutrality)
Currency & comprehensiveness
Readibility
Verifiability

What do people think? Can anyone think of better sections? Feel free to play with the subarticle. - Ta bu shi da yu 12:19, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sigh. And how does this differ from FAC? This is what I mean; you're overriding all the discussion above about how we might actually get a process that does something genuinely useful, and maybe helps us on the way to Wikipedia 1.0, because you're impatient that things have taken a while so far. Ambi 13:03, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It differs from FAC because FAC articles change over time. This is different because we are discussing a particular revision, not an article that changes over time. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:09, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But it's exactly the same process. By doing this, we may as well just make a protected version of every featured article when it is first featured. It seems to me to be the most useless way that we could possibly implement stable versions of articles, when with a bit more planning, we could do something different which could really move things forward for the project as a whole, and potentially kickstart Wikimedia 1.0. Ambi 13:15, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What do you have planned, out of interest? Anyway, it's a good issue, and not one that has really been expressed well in this talk page. My idea, now, is to subdivide the subarticle into mandatory criteria and optional criteria. We basically use the most stable revision as the revision that is most accurate and readable. Neutrality is obviously non-negotiable. Comprehensiveness is not necessary, though desirable. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:17, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You're missing the point. You're still conceptualising this process entirely in the grain of FAC; a bunch of criteria, presumably similar to there, which then lead to the article being protected in another space; things which could still be achieved by just protecting copies of newly promoted FAs. Furthermore, proceeding with this as it currently stands, however, without answering the questions above about scalability and what such a process would hope to achieve seems to me to be not the most helpful way of going about things; it's putting having some process up and running ASAP over actually making sure that that process does something useful. Ambi 13:31, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ambi -- I presume that you oppose the idea of Stable Articles being exclusively "Super Featured Articles"? I'm not so keen on that, either. I would prefer to see stable versions being revisions of articles that, while correct and decently written, might still be lacking in areas (e.g. completeness, or illustration). Still, I think Ta bu shi da yu's suggestion is interesting and worthwhile, because any process to establish a stable version might well involve things like "accuracy" and "readibility" etc, even if it's not meant to be "the best of Wikipedia" (which is what I think FAs should be). — Matt Crypto 13:20, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You're basically right in that I don't see much point in this being yet another process for determining good articles; the problem with TBSDY's proposal so far is that it bears remarkable similarity to FAC. The main problem thusfar is that people haven't agreed on precisely what this page is supposed to achieve. Is this to be another "best of Wikipedia" page? Are we going to try and get as much of Wikipedia as possible covered in these stable versions? Are we going to try and use this as a stepping stone to Wikipedia 1.0? Are these stable versions going to just be protected from vandalism, or are we going to make sure that they're accurate as well? All of those goals would require different methods of going about it, which is why I see trying to proceed with one specific one straight away as not being very helpful. Ambi 13:31, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, let's hear it. What are your ideas on getting a stable version into play? No offense intended here, but I haven't actually heard an original idea as yet. I really am asking this to find a better way! If you have one, I'm all ears. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The way that I would personally proceed would probably be to try to use this to advance Wikipedia 1.0. Briefer versions of articles (suitable for print) could be added and approved. As they would be much shorter than most good Wikipedia articles, they would be much easier to verify (solving a major problem), and much easier to finetune from current content relatively quickly (dealing with issues of scalability). They would have the advantage of contributing to a clear use down the line (Wikipedia 1.0). There are plenty of other options, though, and this may well not be the best. I'm very much open to suggestions. Ambi 13:38, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

An admirable idea, but not one presented by this proposal. This proposal is to get the whole article, in all its gory detail up to speed so that it can be relatively stable and people can have some confidence that it hasn't been vandalised or hold any really bad inaccuracies. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:41, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This may be what you've had in mind, but there's been plenty of other ideas floated by other people here that may be better ways of doing this. Indeed, Zondor, who created this page in the first place, has explicitly suggested that this process be linked to Wikipedia 1.0.

Is it worth putting all this effort into making sure articles aren't vandalised, when (with the exception of articles like George W. Bush), this isn't a major issue most of the time? While the addition of an accuracy requirement may make it more useful, how would you make sure that an article doesn't contain any really bad inaccuracies? Unless a much stronger system of fact checking was added, I suspect that such a system would be a lot of effort for comparatively little gain - it would be no more of a reliable source than the regular Wikipedia, and indeed would just be more out of date. Ambi 13:46, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have asked in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates to slightly change their procedure to make their way into this proposal. -- Zondor 14:32, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My hope for "Stable versions" is that we'll have a simple, lightweight process. The actual criteria as to whether a version is "stable" is left up to those who are making the actual decision. I beleive that trusting the good intentions of the folks voting to declare a stable version is sufficient. Thus objections about neutralty, accuracy, etc. should be sufficient to block the declaration of a stable version. However, if no objections are raised, then an aricle may be declared stable (even if it is known to be lacking in various ways). I'm proposing something subtle here: that objections about POV are enough to stop declaration of stability. This is different from the laborius, intensive process required to vet an article to be truly, absolutely free from POV. linas 18:37, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea, but what we really need is branching

I like this idea, but the big problem with publishing a version of the article in the way you propose is that the history is lost. Worse still, protecting the release page, while important, prevents us from making later necessary changes such as severe errors that were missed. Moving the article is not an option, since it can no longer be edited for future releases.

What we need, pursuing the software development analogy, is branching. We need a way to branch off a version from the current version that will have the same history but will no longer be edited except for "fixes"; that is, new content will not be added, extensive refactoring will not be done, it will just be fact-checked and small fixes done. This could be enforced by a strict review process. This will enable it to become more "polished" over time while the current version continues to grow in depth and organization. At a later time another "release" could supplant the old one, perhaps with an option of viewing the previous "release" if desired.

The end result would be the same we see with software: the release version becomes very reliable and is suitable for public use at all times, but without all the cutting-edge content (our equivalent of features) of the current version. Deco 01:29, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

good idea. how about still having protected pages but fixes (republication) of those protected release articles are a speedy process just like we have Wikipedia:Speedy delete. -- Zondor 01:59, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

While I see what you're getting at, I think it would become outdated fairly quickly, and unless the articles were to be specifically and thoroughly checked, I don't think they would be likely to be any more accurate than the live 'pedia. Ambi 04:47, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Let's be more clear about the goals we have. The purpose of the proposal is to produce an end product that is to be consumed. ie. To be printed and to be used in schools in which students rely upon. Any article that is left unprotected is not considered fully trustworthy because at any given time, it could be subjected to vandalism no matter how quick we respond to it. Yes, they have to be thoroughly checked if it is ever to be used in court cases. If the stable versions are still left unprotected, we are still at the original problem in trying to reach Wikipedia:1.0 because how can you starting printing them while they are still being edited (unprotected)? Articles can continuously be improved forever but it has to come to an end at some point. Protection is a declaration of the final revision. Plus, they can always be republished. Once we get 10,000 strong finally revised articles, we just click Print and Wikipedia:1.0 finally becomes a reality. -- Zondor 06:56, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is what I envisioned with this, too. Are we going to try to establish "stable versions" of every article in full, though, or are we going to only work on print-sized segments of articles likely to be included in a print distribution? I suspect the latter would be of more use for a print edition and would scale much better, enabling us to produce a much more accurate final product. Ambi 10:28, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(unindenting for space)

I agree that free editing of the "release version" defeats the point. Instead, it should be protected against all editors except for a small set of "owners" who contributed significantly to the original article and can be trusted. These people would be advised of the type of changes that are acceptable for a release version, such as spelling/grammar fixes and accuracy problems. Suggested changes would be noted on the talk page, and owners would seek a consensus about whether the changes are appropriate. The person who organizes the release (an administrator) would select the original owners, and the owners would have the power to add new owners. It could be tricky though to avoid a situation where a camp representing one viewpoint gains political control over the change approval process. Deco 22:21, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I want to stress that it's not sufficient to republish the article, because while the working article might have additional corrections, it is also likely to have new content or reorganization that has not been reviewed as thoroughly as the content of the release version (as it should - that's the purpose of the working version.) It may be desirable to copy some fixes from the release version back into the working version (or vice versa), but this may involve nontrivial modification of the changes due to content drift. Deco 22:53, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Branching in this way is much more like what I've been thinking and I think it has the potential to be much more valuable. The idea's could be combined though and we'd be able to see which offers more value. The idea would be to have the wild open branch, a stable branch and a released version. If anyone knows how FreeBSD's branches work, this will be really clear. The released version would be what this proposal is currently focused on. One, unchanging page that is only replaced by a later, better version. The stable version would be editable by trusted editors only, and trusted would be figured out later, but be limited to editors that have shown they make good edits. Good diff functions between the freely editable version and the stable version should be able to make keeping them in sync fairly straight forward. This means there is always a trusted version available to the reader, and they have the option of whether they want to see the newest material, a checked over one with the newest material, or a recently picked locked version. I believe if done right this could be the missing link between Wikipedia's current poor state on average and the level of respectability that a project like this could get to. What this stable version offers:
- Still up to date and able to improve quickly
- No vandalism. Only registered, trusted editors can edit it.
- No revert wars. Anyone revert warring immediately loses their trusted status.

I believe the current system cannot get most articles to a truly high level, but a system with additional methods like this could. I don't think just having a single locked version will do enough. - Taxman ^Talk 20:26, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Variant on the branching idea

We could establish a "stable versions" namespace; at any given time, Stable:Foo could refer either to nothing or to one version of the article Foo. In the absence of controversy, any administrator could establish a version as stable, or move forward (but probably not backward, which would usually mean controversy) what version was considered stable. In the presence of controversy -- that is, lack of consensus as to what version is stable -- I would argue that, by definition, there is no stable version. As usual, it's hard to say exactly what constitutes consensus, but that is no different issue here than everywhere else on Wikipedia. We'd need some sort of polling process (a la WP:AFD or WP:FAC to deal with controversy. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:41, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I see where you're getting at, but I don't really see much benefit in doing so. The "stable version" would be only the tiniest bit more reliable than the live encyclopedia, yet it would take quite a bit of work to create and continually keep updated. Ambi 02:38, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm rather interested in this process in order for it to reduce the amount of work, not to increase it. I am hoping that the time saved in dealing with mediocre edits more than makes up for the time spent declaring a stable version. Right now, I spend an unhealthy amount of time reviewing minor edits. I could be a lot more productive if I were to review only major edits, less often. I am hoping that with a good "stable version" policy, it will be easier to create good articles, not harder. linas 02:52, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Two things came to my mind from my experience. (1) I think no one would disagree that some sort of branching-support is ultimately needed. Many problems in wikipedia seem to be related to a poor revision control. A particular one I frequently face is that some people like to stabilize articles as much as possible in terms of factuality, style and etc. They thus dislike people (namely ones like me) who add half-barked materials like incomplete proofs or demonstrations or somehow experimental elaboration of a topic, which might not work in the end. When I just want to put some draft, I couldn't care less about the format or English grammar. But I know that irritates some other people. This happens because people are seeking different objections in the same branch. The branching support should eliminate this problem effectively. (2) The need for the accountability is absolute, and many commenting here appear to be missing this. Wikipedia has been, indeed constantly, criticized for the lack of accountability. We can try to do the best job in accuracy, that's ok; we here believe that wiki is the best way to achieve this. But the accountability is a different matter. There are people, ones like librarians I think, who need some old-style assurance; the "explicit" notice that the article was peer-reviewed and verified and some people or institution does guarantee what the article says is true and if not you can sue them. You think we don't want this? I don't think so; an encyclopedia has to be equipped with this kind of assurance not wiki-assurance, which may suffice to many like me. -- Taku 14:08, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How, though, do we go about achieving this? Ambi 00:33, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I thought that the idea is that this project can help. First, Having two versions, when the article becomes long, complete and frequently edited, is a good starting point for more sophisticated branching. Secondly, if the page is protected, at least that guarantees that the article does not contain any error that is not spotted by wikipedia editors. (That is, the stable version addresses one primary criticism that anyone can edit an article in wikipedia) In short, this is what the project page says. I have, however, one constructive suggestion that I think is unmentioned so far. Articles in wikipedia are usually checked by a number of users using watch list or recent changes or user contributions. This fact, however, is not necessarily apparently to outside people. Thus, we can make it this more explicit. In particular, when we extract a stable version, some qualified person like one with Ph.D., among contributors to the article, put his name to say that he assures that he or someone he trusts read and fact-checked the article. -- Taku 22:37, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, since this is information about the article rather the the topic it more properly belongs on the talk page. I agree that having two versions helps.

Protection would work okay, but any changes would have to go through an admin then. In the short term, a good way with dealing with this might be to have some kind of "request for changes to stable version" page where people propose and debate changes to stable versions in a public forum. Admins could watch the page, close out debates, and enact the result, just as on AfD. In the long run, I think this forum would be swamped and we'd need something like the "article owners" feature I described above. Deco 00:53, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Certification

FYI, There is a proposal at User:DavidLevinson/Future involving certification of articles by "individuals", "clubs" and "leagues". The quality of the article could be judged in part by the reputation of the certifying club, and vice-versa: the reputation of the club follows from the quality of the articles it certifies. Different clubs might use different certification processes (e.g. one club might use the current WP:FA process, another club might use domain-expert peer review, and a third some anti-elitist npov policy). linas 20:27, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Article validation feature "going live soon"

FYI, see meta:Article validation feature which is going live real soon! There seems to have been little or no discussion of this feature, and the demo is also hopelessly confusing at this point. However, it seems relevent and possibly central to this discussion. linas 22:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This looks like a really great tool for fighting vandalism and other bad changes, which is also a motivation for stable versions, but in my opinion stable versions (as I imagine them) still solve an important problem that article validation does not: in the stable version of an article, new and unpolished "rough draft" content which has not been edited for style and fact-checked is never present. In a working article, it's necessary to have changes that in the short term detract from an article until they're "cleaned up". Any change to a stable version not only undergoes great scrutiny, but changes with substantial "risk" of detracting from the article even in the short term would be disallowed entirely (such changes would only come in with the next "release" from the working version). Deco 02:17, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but how does one "pick" which version shall be the "stable version", and isn't "article validation" just another name for "picking the stable version"? linas 17:45, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hrm, maybe I'm confused about exactly what article validation does. I have to look at this some more. Deco 21:34, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, after looking further at this I better understand article validation. Article validation allows users to rate a particular version of an article. New versions which have not received a sufficient number of positive ratings are not displayed by default. Users have the choice of seeing the latest positively-rated version or the most recent version. This seems to be very similar indeed to the original proposal discussed here (without branching). Deco 23:26, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A thought re voting

I like the idea of having users vote on whether an article is good enough to call "stable". However, sockpuppets and such could be a problem. I recall that when we elected the current board, only registered users who had made some number of edits (400?), going back for a certain length of time, were eligible to vote. (Not sure of details, can't find the page.) Some such qualification for voting on article stability would not burden most legitimate editors, but would create a difficult hurdle for vandals. Tualha (Talk) 10:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A very anti-wiki policy

I think this a policy that goes against the spirit of Wikipedia and that will probably do more harm than good. Neither of the two models proposed are beneficial. The first one is quite unpalatable for Wikipedia, particularly the notion of protecting articles once they are completed. The second one, where the stable article would be placed at a different namespace or subpage causes confusion, as there would be two versions of the same article. I think this whole argument has a false premise - that Wikipedia somehow tends to becoming a completed, final work. We haven't worked here as volunteers to complete an encyclopedia that will then be locked and published. Rather, Wikipedia is designed to always stay open, both for minor changes and updating, but also because there will never be a truly perfect article. For this reason, it is very important that even once articles are featured, they remain open to change, and not only for updates. As new contributors come, they will make them even better. I think this is what has made Wikipedia so successful in the past - this collective nature of work, this constant refinement, etc, and continuing to do so is important at any price. I think vandalism hasn't proved to be such a destructive force that we can justify applying this very anti-wiki policy. Ronline ✉ 09:28, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have a problem with it. IMO, we do need a stable revision. It won't effect the main body of work, surfers will still see the most up2date version. - Ta bu shi da yu 10:09, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is the typical respond from those who are opposed (not personal),but why not make an suggestion also? I think it's naive to think articles only get better,only looking at Feature article removal canidate tells a different tale.

Not to mention that when someone clicks on an article they don't know that the version they are looking at is vandal free.They can't assume the data they want to use is checked and safe.Of course a paper encyclopedia can have errors too,but at least their page can't be factually destroyed at any moment.Vandal patrol is nice,but when someone vandalises a page and some student loads the page a second later,the patrol is powerless.

So as is wikipedia will forever be a bunch of text written by people who like to write about stuff as a hobby,but it will never be USEFULL information source.As a result the "encyclopedia" word should be removed.

Or should it?One of the goals was to make a free encyclopedia.So something that contributes toward this can't be against the project.Some flexibility will be needed and rejecting every proposal without making a counter offer that's reasonable isn't the way to go--Technosphere83 10:43, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's very clear what my suggestion is: abolish this policy and maintain the status quo :) I admit that once an article becomes very developed, there is a probability that it worsens, but I think by simply watching it, that chance can be reduced significantly. However, I think the potential that an article will be either updated or improved is much greater and much more useful than the chance that a potential change will cause problems. The point of whether an article is good-quality or not shouldn't be dealt with under the stable versions policy, but by the validation policy. Yes, I support informing users that a certain article has been featured and verified for accuracy. That is why I think that it's important to inform readers on the actual article if an article is featured. However, I don't support taking that further and basically locking articles or creating duplicate versions. The main point I'm trying to get at here is that in a free encyclopedia, just like in a free society, there is a downside. There is a cost for freedom, but I think in the case of Wikipedia, just like in the case of a political system, it's worth it. I think we've got to accept that vandalism will always be a problem at Wikipedia, but instead of trying to go against the very founding principles of the system in order to combat it, we should simply be paying more attention to patrolling it. If I had to choose between a vandalism-free encyclopedia and an encyclopedia that is ever-richer and ever more updated, I'd definitely choose the latter. That's why I've come to Wikipedia - and use Wikipedia as a reference frequently - and not to Britannica and Encarta.

Ronline ✉ 10:58, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hah,that's the point you CAN'T use wikipedia as a serious reference at the moment,because even if there is this (nobel) patrol they can't ,and I repeat, can't help when someone vandalises a page (in the worse case factually) and a user loads the page a second later.At that instant the damage is done.The user (let's assume it was a FA) thinks he can thrust the info while he's actually using false info.

I don't care if someone vandalises a page with "my cock is bigger than yours",because that is an obvious case of vandalism,I'm much more worried of vandals that tamper with facts.These vandals make wikipedia unsuable.Even if it only is a potential problem as long as I don't know if I can thrust the loaded page,wikipida will remain a nice idea that never really worked. --Technosphere83 13:02, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"I don't care if someone vandalises a page with "my cock is bigger than yours". Good, 'cause I've been meaning to do that for weeks now... </joke> I'm No Parking and I approved this message

Well, in practice maybe that argument in applicable, but I can tell you from experience that I have used Wikipedia extensively, both for personal information and for research, and never so far have I made fun of myself by using false facts from Wikipedia.

Ronline ✉ 09:59, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ronline, you might be a little too optimistic about the quality of our articles. Take the recent RfC concerning Roylee, for example. This user has been editing lots and lots of articles, adding authorative sounding bits that actually were of the worst pseudo-scientific kind. He largely went unnoticed. The real problem is that you can't really say that this is an exception; at present, we simple have no way of knowing that. — mark ✎ 10:41, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That those problems went unnoticed means that none of the editors editing the article knew enough to spot the error. How would splitting the article into a stable and working version help this? If the people editing the article don't have enough knowlege, neither will the ones voting to make it a stable version. Noticing problems like this relies on having many editors with enough knowlege about the subject. This can be accomplished by increasing the number of editors. Placing restrictions on editing and adding delays for the main results to appear on the main version of the page will probably have the opposite effect. Amaurea 09:08, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Different proposal

Is it possible to have an extra tab "stable version" that has the latest agreed version of an article?This would mean that the main article would still be edible but the last "reviewed" edition of the article would be displayed on the "stable version" tab page.

I've come to understand that, although I might be wrong here,when you use a link of a version in the history you don't need to lock the page because you can't edit it anyway.

This would however make it impossible to make error corrections,so an article that goes up should be well checked.Even so the chances in theory could be made much faster than a paper encyclopedia. At the same time it would remain in the spirit of "wiki",because the actual article is still edible. --Technosphere83 10:54, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But you see - that would be basically paying lip-service to the open nature of Wiki. It's like telling people: you can edit an article, but all your edits will have to be reviewed by experts before the article gets published. Having two versions of an article defeats the purpose of wiki, aside from making it much more confusing. Once you implement this policy, everyone will go straight to the stable version. And, for someone's edits to make it to a stable version, it has to go through a rigorous process. So, in practice, Wikipedia becomes sort of like Nupedia - a peer-reviewed encyclopedia rather than a truly free encyclopedia. I'm making a plea to everyone here - please remember of the origins of Wikipedia. We started out as a truly free encyclopedia, and it's been that absolute freedom - that anyone can edit the encyclopedia - that's made Wikipedia so successful. Imposing boundaries for the sake of trying to combat vandalism due to media coverage is not only a grave breach of the founding principles of Wikipedia, but would harm our sustainability in the future. Thanks,

Ronline ✉ 11:03, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There already is a review system,2 actually.You have Featured article canidate and featured article review.I don't think this would be anymore confusing for the reader than the rest of wikipedia to be honest (talk page/wiki concept/creat a page/categories/etc..).

I also doubt that everyone would jump to the "stable version" seeing as the editable version might be more up to date.But people who would actually want to use the information would be glad for a "stable version".My proposal also doesn't go against the spirit of wikipedia at all.People will still see the editable version first and just have an extra option.A good option might I add. I really don't see why you could be against this middle ground.

This has nothing to do with the media btw,this has more to do with the nature of wikipedia and although it's nice it also has it's pitfalls.What future btw?As a blob of text?Because without giving the reader at least some means of credibility that's all it will ever be,a blob of text. --Technosphere83 12:53, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The only way I would support stable versions is if this structure becomes a notification and nothing else - i.e. pages which are stable would have a notice on them saying they are stable, have been extensively reviewed, etc. I think this would solve the problem of trust, since people would trust versions declared to be stable. However, stable versions should still be fully editable. I will never support anything that seeks to curtail the open editability of Wikipedia, since that goes against the encyclopedia's principles.

Ronline ✉ 13:08, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How can you call it a stable version,when a second later someone can change let's say the date of a battle?

I'm not even proposing something new here,anyone in theory can already look up the "stable version" with the history tab.The ONLY thing I'm proposing is having an extra tab that is an easy way for a user to ACCES the last stable version in the history of the page.Really it is already there,it's a bit hypocritical not to give a user an easy way to acces it.--Technosphere83 13:14, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Making" a stable version is easy,they only thing it has to abide to is that the facts are correct.It doesn't have to be FA or anything.Take a article check the facts,paste the link to the "stable version" tab and call it a day.As long as the fact's are good the "stable version" can shift daily.Not to mention the editable article is still the center piece.The only thing that this proposal hopes to accomplish is adding some credibility,which wikipedia frankly lacks and will always lack unless something is done.--Technosphere83 13:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The difference is that it's open to misinterpretation. People might think that the "stable" version was approved by an expert. People already rely on Wikipedia more than they should. I think that your proposal would add a false sense of credibility, which is worse (especially from a legal viewpoint) than saying up front, "hey, we can be edited by a 4-year-old and no one will notice." Diphyllobothriasis went for 8 months before I noticed that vandalism made it through the cracks. Dave (talk) 03:26, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's a good point as well. I've said all along that Wikipedia needs to come to terms with the fact that vandalism will always occur, but we also need to understand that we can still build a damn great encyclopedia even if there's vandalism, and that we have an excellent series of principles and structures - such as openness - that are worth being kept despite the vandalism. And I don't know why people expect that more rigorous peer review will get rid of the problem. So far, a lot of people vote for featured articles by looking at them for two minutes, seeing if there are nice pictures, a comprehensive structure and references, and then vote for them.

Ronline ✉ 07:46, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ronline, you are well intentioned, but misplaced. Vandalism doesn't need to always occur, and we don't need to come to terms with it. At least not in the way you think. No one ever claimed that being radically open was Wikipedia's most important principle. Building a free (libre) encyclopedia is. The Linux kernel is free and it, like anything else released under the GPL will always be free. Wikipedia would do well to emulate that. Having a stable version won't make the information any less free. What we need to see is is there a way to combine the best of both worlds? I think there is, and some type of stable version may be it. What you fail to take into account is how many qualified experts never become editors or don't stick around because of the crap we put up with on a regular basis here. We need more qualified experts, not just anyone. If there is a stable version that is shown by default to the public, but a freely editable version on the backend, Wikipedia is still free to contribute by all, but the public version doesn't have to put up with vandalism. Good diff functions would make integrating the improvements into the stable version relatively simple. If trusted users were identified to keep the stable versions updated, then many of the downsides of the current system are gone, with a few good upsides. The cost is likely much smaller than the gain. What you have to reallize is that what worked when Wikipedia was a mostly unknown site will not necessarily (and in fact probably will not) work forever. Not all processes scale, and we're seeing problems all over the place. We can have the best of both worlds, and it's going to require change. - Taxman ^Talk 19:52, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have always thought openness is a core principle of Wikipedia. And intuitively, I dislike the idea of working with 'trusted users' and (at least implicitly) 'non-trusted users.' It sounds like hierarchy, and to me that's something Wikipedia certainly isn't about... Larix 09:26, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

See below. Free information is the goal, not free editing at all cost. - Taxman ^Talk 13:22, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oh well,I guess it's impossible to at least get a fact checked version (the single most important thing for an encyclopedia).I guess I'll give up since there seems to be this fobia against anything that offers some credibility.wikipedia will remean a great place for a lot of text,just not an encyclopedia.In essence this means the links below an article are more important than the article itself.So why bother writing aything anymore.Wikipedia the free link collection would be a better name.They have a name for thrue freedom in politics it's called anarchy even liberals know this --Technosphere83 10:41, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Another thing,at one point all the good editors will learn this the hard way and will get tiered to contibute to something pointless,because their work will get reduced to crap in the end anyway.This "patrol" is like some real-lifeDon Quixote.Guarding 800.000 articles,give me a break.

To illustrate my point :

"I humbly suggest that this policy proposal be linked with the proposed Wikipedia:Stable versions. In my neck of the woods (mathematics), we've got maybe a thousand articles (out of 12,000) that could be marked as "good", but I am exhausted by the vandalism patrol needed to keep them good. For example, gravity: every science-punk high-school snot thinks they can "improve" this article, and the result is a horrid mix of genius and utter crap that no one wants to maintain. Slapping a GA label on it helps no one, as it will continue to be vandalised, and I'll still be exhausted trying to patrol it. I want a mechanism that will allow me to focus on writing and editing, instead of patrolling.linas 20:51, 15 December 2005 (UTC)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Good_articles#Link_with_Wikipedia:stable_versions

It might also be a great idea to read signpost #50 because it seems a certain person argrees,that change is needed.

In the end no matter how "free" it is,if the goal of wikipedia in the long run is wasting time,bandwidth and money(contrubutions) than it is completely pointless. --Technosphere83 19:27, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's inevitable

It's clear to me that we must do something along these lines. No matter how we try to rationalize it (and it's been rationalized in various ways since day one), the central objection that people have to Wikipedia as a serious (that is, usable) reference remains, and has recently proven real. No matter what checks and balances we have, no matter how quickly vandalism, misinformation, and subtle POV-injection are reversed, the fact that they occur and that there is a finite possibility that a user will view or download that version of an article makes the current model unworkable.

I posit that we must take a cue, once again, from the software model: many shareware and freeware distributors do quite well with parallel "stable versions" and "beta versions" of a given program. That is, the creation of a stable version article need not preclude future edits -- the stable version isn't a lockout of work on the topic, just a well-vetted, consensus-built stopping point that can be used with confidence. The beta or "live" version of the same page exists in parallel -- I imagine simple cross-links and page-type descriptions would do the trick here -- and, when appropriate (that is, when significant improvements have been made and the resulting article re-checked by whatever process is put in place), the stable version can be updated with the live version. If you try to edit the stable version, you are simply re-directed to the edit page for the live version (with appropriate explanation).

This process maintains the spirit of Wikipedia while avoiding so many of the problems we currently face. In any event, all the whinging about "unwikiness" is a sign of another problem we have -- a focus on the supposed needs of the "community" rather than the needs of the Wikipedia user. An encyclopedia or other reference isn't anything without an audience, and making the process work to the benefit of the user, rather than ourselves and our wiki-feelings, ought to be the focus here. Jgm 01:53, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Let me add, in response to someone above who worried that a "stable version" would be interpreted as having been fact-checked: in a system where we define "stable versions", they absolutely should be fact checked. A beautiful side effect of such a system is that it promotes a type of Wikipedia contribution that is almost impossible to do properly now and that remains a gaping chasm between Wikipedia and a "real" reference: the vetting and fact-checking process. Jgm 02:00, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I just want to add that while I agree with these general ideas, I still think it's important to allow editing of both versions. In software, there are milestones, freezes, and increasingly strict requirements for changes over a lifecycle. We can't (or at least don't) enforce that here, and consequently some articles simply won't tend towards a stable version — corrections and additions of new content will be intermingled for all time. With the ability to edit both versions, we can apply relatively "safe" but important changes to the stable version without having to clean up all the new content in the working version first. Deco 02:22, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When I have multiple versions of a paper for class, I invariably screw it up and get out-of-sync versions, which creates big headaches for me. And that's just one person editing one paper. Multiple parallel versions of nearly a million articles edited by ten thousand people (many of whom are unfamiliar with the project) would be impossible to keep track of. I don't know a whole lot about open-source software, but it seems to me that given the way our mission differs from Linux's, we don't want to end up with a "Red Hat Wikipedia" that is edited separately from the "Debian Wikipedia" and so on. Ask someone on the Spanish Wikipedia how well they keep their project synchronized with Encyclopedia Libre, and I think you'll see why this is a bad idea. Dave (talk) 02:31, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Not if edits to the stable versions were strictly controlled and limited to a select group. When you write a paper you have rough drafts and final drafts, which are much the same idea - would you want your professor reading your rough drafts? This isn't about different "flavors" of Wikipedia, just a stable version and a working version for each article, with most edits being to the working version and only a few "emergency" edits to the stable version (or some of the proponents here prefer no edits to the stable version, but either way would be better than what we have). Deco 02:44, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I was primarily responding to Deco, who said that "it's important to allow editing of both versions" and talked about software development. Dave (talk) 02:56, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There would never need to be more than two clearly-distinguished versions of any given article - the most recent stable version and the live/beta version. The Wikipedians can still work to improve the live/beta version (and, when it is clearly an improvement and well-vetted it can supplant the current stable version) while the user has the choice of using the stable version with confidence and/or checking out the live/beta version with possibly more, better, or more recent information but also slightly more risk of inaccuracy. Everybody wins. Having two versions generally-editable makes the problem worse rather than better, and allowing editing by only super-users to edit rankles the wikilove crowd. I'd propose that changes to the stable article have to be done via the live version, with an expedited process to reset the stable version when required. Jgm 14:11, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm ok with rankling the masses. Sometimes things need to get done even if they are unpopular. Having both versions editable, but the stable version only by trusted users offers huge advantages in timeliness and stability as elucidated in earlier sections. Having good diff functions between them should be able to make it easy to sync improvements. Besides, there's no downside to having an additional tab that someone can click on to choose the stable version. I believe that would quickly, and widely become the chosen one that people looking for information would go to. - Taxman ^Talk 15:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Using the software analogy again, many version control programs have a specific feature for merging changes between branches. We already have diffing - just imagine a big button on the diff results page that says "Merge these changes into the stable version and preview" or "Merge these changes into the working version and preview", depending on which one you're looking at. Text merging tools work relatively well and any unsuccessful part of the merge can be cleaned up before hitting Submit. Deco 01:15, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The current version was never workable or at least it doesn't scale well when wikipedia grows and it's already a big boy!Featured article review is in the same boat,it might still be workable today,but when you have 2000 FA's few will ever get a timely review.

The current model is one that is in flux at every time and the sad thing is once an article gets a certain quality it starts to lose that quality slowly.The new model you could compair to an arcade game.you can always play the game,but the game always tracks the high score.So a new low score wouldn't erase the amazing record.Even if an article degrates there is still a "good" version.An editor can at a later time step in and try to "outdo" the high-score.--Technosphere83 15:44, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Coda proposal

I agree that we need a mechanism to maintain the quality of articles that have undergone review. At the same time I think one of the great strengths of Wikipedia is that articles are always subject to revision. I think there is a way to have both. I propose a Coda namespace, with entries that would be associated with every "released" article. The coda content would be displayed at the end of the article (perhaps a user-selectable preference). While the article would be frozen, the coda would be fully editable and subject to all the Wikipedia policies that apply to articles (as opposed to talk pages). The coda could share the talk page with the released article, but have it's own history.

The coda might include the following sections:

Errata

This would be a place to list clear errors in the released article: spelling, typos, incorrect dates, broken Wiki and reference links, etc.

Additional see also and Additional external links

New articles come along, old ones are merged or have their names changed, and, of course, external links are always breaking. The coda would be the place to fix things. An even better alternative might be to have each article's See also and External links be placed in the coda when the article is released, instead of in the frozen article body. There they could continue to be maintained and evolve.

Subsequent developments

Stuff like:

"The author died in a kiln explosion on March 4, 2007.

"The play was made into a full length motion picture starring Dustin Hoffman and Angelina Jolie"

"The former president was convicted on drug trafficking charges in 2009 and will be eligible for parole in 2018."

Additional points of view or Controversy

Places where the debate can continue, again, subject to normal policy (limited space for crackpot views, NPOV presentation, etc.)

Other coda material might include new images from Wikicommon, pointers to Wikisource and, perhaps new sections amplifying point in the article.

Periodically the article might be revised to incorporate material from the coda. The incorporation of errata would require a simpler review, after which the errata section of the coda would be cleared, but the rest of the coda would remain intact. We might use software style numbering, e.g. Rev 1.02 might be the second update that just included errata. A full update (Rev 2.0) would be expected to deal with all material in the coda, at least as of some cutoff date. A template in the coda could announce that a revision was in the works and point people to the update under development.

I believe this coda proposal would require only modest Wikimedia changes and would go a long way toward letting us have our cake and eat it too. --agr 19:40, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is an interesting idea that of course is known to work quite well for static things, but to me it seems a bit silly that any article we post should contain known errors, when this is a web page and they should be easy to fix. I would say that things like additional see also/external links, subsequent developments, and additional POVs are quite reasonable to reserve for a new version, but simple errata and broken links should be fixed more quickly. Deco 19:51, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The "published" article should still be open to edits by a select number of authors.The edits they may make should be very small like spelling and small structural improvement.

Any small factual chance(like a date or number) should be made very clearly in the edit summary and the talk-page.

Limiting it in this way should make it managable to patrol these "published" versions.

Bigger chances that are needed because of emergencies like grave errors that came to light or an large development concerning the topic should be dealt with something similar to speedy deletion.In this case it would be an emergency review + correction (somewhat like Featured article review,but a bit faster).A template in this case should placed on the article of course.--Technosphere83 13:36, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Current open model

I don't think this policy would be a good idea, as it is incompatible with an idea I consider central to the Wikipedia project: the freedom of everyone to contribute. Sure there is a downside to that, but I'd prefer to accept it and stick with the open wiki model, which guarantees the freedom of everyone (accept blocked vandals) to improve an article. Larix 14:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think this changes that. The working version would still be freely editable. Only the release version is restricted, and this is necessary to create any kind of guarantee of quality (at all times). A more debatable question is whether the working or release version should be the "default" view. Deco 20:22, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The working version would, yes. But the principle is that Wikipedia can be edited by everyone, and this idea gets lost if you start working with separate, ´definite´ versions. Even if they can be replaced by more up-to-date working versions. Also, it would give a signal that we don't really trust our own peer review system ourselves. Larix 09:16, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Different circumstances require different methods. No one ever claimed radical openness is the most important thing. In fact Jimbo has said repeatedly that being a social experiment is not the primary aim and building an encyclopedia is. These romantic notions about being 100% free for everyone to contribute don't necessarily help us reach the most important goal of providing good information to everyone, in fact they can detract from it. The most important goal is free information of high quality, not free editing. - Taxman ^Talk 13:20, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's not the peer review system itself being the problem. Subsequent changes have not been through formal peer review prior to be declared usable again. Wikipedia is a wiki meaning its pages are all freely editable. Protecting pages is indeed anti-wiki and there are elements of it already in Wikipedia as necessary evil. Let's not forget Wikipedia is an encyclopedia meaning its content can't just be simply changed. So, no principle is broken. It needs published/stable/revised/frozen versions to be a genuine encyclopedia. -- Zondor 13:24, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry to disagree with you, but I think Wikipedia owes its appeal for a large extent to the idealism of the users working on it, who feel they are in a collaborative project together with equals. Calling this idea a mere 'romantic notion' is in my opinion somewhat easy, as it's an important motivation for (I think) many users here. Larix 17:18, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm just as idealistic about the freedom of information, and believe that is where the real appeal is. It's just clear that complete freedom of editing has greater and greater costs as Wikipedia gets larger. This and related proposals aim to offer the best of both worlds. Opposing the innevitable on the grounds that it is less free is unfortunate. Not only will the information remain free as in libre, even with this proposal implemented the current wiki stays exactly as free as it is, and perhaps something like this could help avoid further encroachments on freedom of editing such as the semi protection policy. You see there an overwhelming majority supported curtailing the ability of anonymous IP's and new editors to reduce the negative effects of free editing. - Taxman ^Talk 20:26, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think curtailing anonymous IP's is fundamentally different from distinguishing between 'trusted' and 'not-trusted' users, as everyone is able to create an account with a name. Therefore, curtailing IP's has no practical effect on the ability for everyone to add. Larix 20:51, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We already have that. What do you think admins are? As an aside, I'm curious, do you just not see the major problems that wide opening editing causes, including scaring away highly qualified people, or do you just think it's all fine in the end or what? It seems you've not been around for long (with this account at least), so maybe you just haven't seen the problems or thought about the need for a fix enough yet. - Taxman ^Talk 22:28, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well this has been discussed untill faces turned blue,but other than it should be "free" no viable solution was brought up by those who don't like the new system. Let's face it "Anyone can edit" isn't always a good thing. Once a article reaches a high quality standard,contributions of people with less understanding of a topic can actually be counter productive.

The reasons why it should be completely open strikes me more like vanity of some people than actually a concern about wikipedia.This is the best compromise between open and a closed model.--Technosphere83 19:38, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The reasons why it should be completely open strikes me more like vanity of some people than actually a concern about wikipedia. Right... I´m not sure who exactly you mean by this, but as you seem to react at my remark, I´ll assume you´re talking about me. And I don´t think I´ve given you any reason to doubt my motives. So please explain. You don't have to share this goal, but you can't expect others to support a proposal which would bring them further from there then we are now. Vanity has nothing to do with that. Larix 20:45, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't targeting you at all.I just wonder why this is a huge problem.Anyone in the end would still have acces to editing the "stable verion" if the prove to be not of bad intend.It's not like it's new to wikipedia,not every one can move a page.I'll give an overview of the pro's and the one con.

Pro :

Gives viewers a version that that has been checked and can't be factually destroyed at any moment.

Even if errors remain (which is possible just look at brittanica) at least they aren't intentional or because someone will less knowledge on the topic made it NPOV or a fringe theory.

They are much more managable to watch and patrol.Making them only editable by trusted users,makes it possible to implement this policy :

-No major edits (only in cas of a major concern)

-Changes well documented (summary/talk page)

This will keep these pages up to date and as accurate as possible and keep the edit history from being a mess.

con :

An annon or a beginner can't edit these pages.To me this isn't a big concern,the pages in question will be already at a certain quality and people who would wan't to edit those are more likely going to be active wikipedians seeing how improving these would require major effort.Not to mention the editable version is still there,ready to be taken to new hights.If it was possible the talk page of a "stable verion" should be open for every one,so suggestions could still be made by everyone.--Technosphere83 15:10, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The communal orientation is indeed a staple part of what makes Wikipedia successful. I would really like to make it even more successful by having Wikipedia recognised as a reputable source. Some private organisation could produce revised editions of Wikipedia for profit but is there anyone here interested in this proposal to do it ourselves? Requests for publication as what Stable Versions was originally called is very much community oriented. Letting pages be freely editable is an easy way to lure newcomers to feel special enough to contribute, but there is more to building Wikipedia than that. There are various ways everyone including anonymous users can build every bit of Wikipedia by editing, deletion, stubbing, categorising, discussing, uploading, reviewing and in particular, publishing as per this proposal. So making stable versions is something that everyone should participate, but frozen pages itself are not neccessarily less communal as the effort to achieve it is. Currently, everyone does have equal rights in influencing Wikipedia. Administrators and Bureaucrats should not be above everyone else but only given enough powers to trusted. -- Zondor 20:55, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What version will users see first?

Will they see the stable version? The dynamic version? Both at once? How will the interface notify them that another version exists? Will logged-in users see the dynamic version while logged-out ones see the stable version?

Also, who's designing the new interface? It's really important that everything work well, be usability-tested first, etc. I'm sure a lot of top-flight designers would be willing to go pro-bono for the publicity. It would be cool if you could get Zeldman, for example. Tlogmer 17:29, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Intuitively, it seems like we would want to show the stable version by default. The theory is that the stable version is more reliable and so better suited for public use. However, by making the working version less prominent to readers, we may discourage editors who are motivated by exposure and efficacy. It's a difficult balance. I'm not sure. Deco 19:12, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think the the working version should be shown first,with a template alerting people that a "stable" version is available.--Technosphere83 19:41, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I like this for several reasons, but primarily that it's a no downside plan. Having a tab or some other brilliant idea for acsessing the stable version would allow those that want that to have it and those that don't to get the wiki. I think frozen version being accessible at something like http://en.wikipedia.org/Richard Feynman would be great. Having this frozen version available would allow quickly validating the worth of this idea. My belief is that you would very quickly see people going to that as the destination if they are wanting to actually use the information, and then going to the wiki if they want to fix something. Of course as I've said above also having an editable, though stable, branch has even more advantages. But having the wiki version the default for now is clearly the lower risk, and lower shock way to change. - Taxman ^Talk 20:20, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Stable versions solve the stub problem

It just occurred to me that one interesting aspect of stable versions is how they solve the long-divisive "stub problem": many wonderful articles start out as pitifully short, incomplete, uninformative articles, and it can be embarassing to Wikipedia for these to be published. In the stable versions model, a stub is simply any article which does not yet have a published stable version; the contributors are still working on the first stable version. (Stable version is maybe a bad term here; maybe "Published version" or something like that?) People who exclusively cite or rely on stable versions would be unable to use these articles, but they could still develop and be available for consumption to risk-taking readers. Deco 23:56, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

And that's supposed to be a good point? One of the many advantages of Wikipedia over other encyclopedias has been the fact that it's had such a broad range of articles, even if some of them were stubs. Secondly, I don't think that according to the current proposal there would be a way to browse through only stable versions. The default view would be the working version, while the stable version would be in a tab. So I don't see how stable versions would enable people to see a stub-free encyclopedia (if that's a good thing...)

What I mean to say most of all, however, is that it's not helpful that this proposal is being nicely clothed and made to seem as if it's not a significant change. This proposal does restrict the free nature of Wikipedia, it does erode one of our founding principles. The argument should therefore be - is it worth it? Is vandalism that bad that the Wikipedia model can't cope and therefore must be reformed? Can the Wikipedia model then be termed as a success, or not? These are the issues we should be coping with. Remember this - the big "selling point" of Wikipedia has been its openly-editable nature, not the fact that it's free to use. The Internet is a vast resource and most of it is free. Heck, even Britannica and Encarta now offer most of their articles for free. The "free as in libre for usage" also hasn't been that big an advantage - although they are copyright, Encarta and Britannica can still be used as research sources, and Wikipedia is mostly used by people for small-scale research or for informing themselves, things which are possible under copyright as well. No, what has been the amazing factor at Wikipedia - the reason why it's such a magnificent idea - is it's openly editable nature. The fact that I can go and update something as it comes about. The fact that I can write about a topic that interests me so the whole world can know as well. That is immensely rewarding. Restrict that, the reward goes away, and Wikipedia's rate of growth decelerates. Therefore, we must look at any attempt to restrict Wikipedia's freedom of editability as a major structural change, and one that would negatively undermine both the uniqueness and the success of the project.

Ronline ✉ 09:04, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Again and as pointed out below, the freely editable version will still be there. So that covers all of your objections. The rest of it you are missing the point. Freely licensed information is the real value. You can't access most of brittanica and even if you did you can't translate it to Spanish and publish it for use in South America. You're prioritizing freely editable over information quality. Who cares what the growth rate is or what information is available on the internet if it is all crap? What we need are methods to improve the information quality. I'm not sure where you got this idea that being freely editable is more important than building an accurate encyclopedia, but that is directly contradicted by Jimbo's statements. I believe that with quality mechanisms in place we'll actually be able to attract truly qualified people and the growth rate of useful information will increase. - Taxman ^Talk 18:03, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I know the openly editable information will still be there! Everyone keeps on telling me this as an attempt to cover up stable versions. The point is that there will now be a stable version which will be prioritised for its quality, at least by some readers, and as time goes by, it may even become the main version. That turns Wikipedia from an entirely open encyclopedia to one only partly open. Is that so hard to understand? Freely-licensed information is of important value, sure. But more important has been open editability. Every single news report about Wikipedia doesn't mention the fact that "it's information can be copied freely" but that "it can be edited by anyone". That's what it says in the intro statement on the Main Page:

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

If stable versions are implemented, only part of the encyclopedia will be there for anyone to edit. I know Jimbo believes otherwise to this, but I don't see why that's an argument.

Ronline ✉ 02:00, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But there is still the open editable version,so infact you can still 'inform the world'.Minor chances should still be possible to make in the "stable" version by thrusted editors (which you would easely fall into with your track record).The authors of the editable version can at all times push their version as the new "stable version".Maybe we could even have an e-bay like feature were you could rate a user.If the rating reaches a certain point,he would be a "trusted user".It would be more like a reward.

You seem to be focused so much on this "free" concept that you forget one thing,that bad info not only misinforms but is actually misleading and damaging and that the world is filled with people who like to destoy others work for entertainment.

What good is a "free" source of info when you can't actually use it?You never seem to address this FUNDAMENTAL concern.Without a quality mechanism wikipedia doesn't have a purpose other than letting people type a lot of words.We don't even reach a stage were we have to be concerned about "free".

Vandalism is also pretty broad and not always intentional.When you have a great article and someone who is not much an expert on the topic as those who brought it were it is can be harmfull for the article and those who read it.

The other concern is that anyone can destroy a page the millisecond before someone loads the page.This is a deal breaker for wikipedia as a reference.

lastly,given that new articles won't get a stable version until the reach "good article" status,I think it's save to say that the majority of articles will still be as free as ever.--Technosphere83 14:49, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Technosphere, you seem to have a very pessimistic view of Wikipedia. As far as I have been here, I have used it as an information source, both for research and for general reading. I don't think anyone can argue that it's "just a bunch of words" or that on the whole it is more inaccurate than accurate. Sure, there have been some high-profile inaccuracy cases recently, but on the whole, it is very accurate and all tests conducted on it by independent reviewers have shown that it is about as accurate as other encyclopedias. That's why I think the premise behind stable versions is wrong - vandalism has not reached a stage yet where it significantly harms the quality of the project. You asked "What good is a "free" source of info when you can't actually use it?". The point is that Wikipedia is being used by millions of people, who appreciate it and find it a suitable source. Even news articles quote it often for its information. Therefore, I think that this whole vandalism and inaccuracy problem has been overblown much too far. I hope this addresses your question.

Ronline ✉ 02:09, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What is Wikipedia, anyway?

I see this as the fundamental division here. If Wikipedia is a social construct, a community, then the idea of closing some pages to edits (even when there is a working version available) is a controversial, even disturbing one. If, on the other hand, Wikipedia is a reference, usable to even those outside the community, this idea is a no-brainer.

Of course, Wikipedia is both of the above. However, the key thing to think about is what differentiates Wikipedia from the many social websites (facebook etc.): that is, we are attempting to create something useful here. Given that, I think the guiding principle for decisions such as this has to be what is best for the user of our construct. Clearly having a Stable Version that is not subject to the most vexing vagaries of Wikipedia (subtle POV-injection, well-meaning wrongheadedness, transient vandalism) is a Very Good Thing from a user perspective and, with the availability of a Working Version, only a minor concession for the community.

Reading this entire discussion again, it seems to me we are very close to a consensus on this issue. So, what's next? Given that this would require changes to the Wiki software, we can't just Be Bold and do it; are any of TPTB watching this discussion? Jgm 23:22, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding what's next, I have solicited the opinion of a developer who will hopefully come look at this page and leave some comments. However, I'll note that we can effect a limited form of this already through the following process:

Look through an article's history. Grab the version you want to publish and copy-paste it into the same article prefixed with "Stable:".
Protect the stable article, stick a template at the top giving a timestamp, linking to the original page, and explaining the concept of stable versions.
Link to the stable version from the top of the original article.

It's not as nice as being able to fork the article with its history for real, and of course would require the participation of an admin for each publication or update to the stable version, but it is a viable proof of concept. Anybody want to take a crack at a good template for this? Deco 23:38, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We can start infecting Wikipedia with this proposal by starting with small stub-like articles that are simple topics and easy to deal with like Bachelor party in the spirit of Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week. -- Zondor 01:16, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The only issue with this is that it could take a while for a stub to reach its first stable version, since we shouldn't really be publishing woefully incomplete working versions. But it would be interesting to see how well it works over the complete "life cycle" of a growing article. Deco 02:01, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Before we change any software, have we addressed and scrutinised every issue about editorial validation that people have come up with in the past? Meta:Article validation proposals, Meta:Article validation feature, Category:Editorial validation, Meta:Category:Article validation. -- Zondor 00:44, 29 December 2005 (UTC) -- Zondor 01:07, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, I don't think we're close to reaching consensus here. From this page and the discussions on the Wikipedia-l mailing list, there seem to be two fairly discrete groups: one that supports stable versions and one that doesn't. We've got to recognise that. Secondly, I think a straw poll should be conducted to gauge broader community opinion (since until now, it seems about 30% of people are against, 70% are in favour, approximately).

Ronline ✉ 02:12, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]