Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:30, 28 November 2005

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)

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)

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 Misplaced Pages? — Matt Crypto 15:06, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

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)

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 Misplaced Pages 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)

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

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 23:46, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

"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as, at least in the scheme proposed, "published" articles would be available on Misplaced Pages just the same as "unpublished articles".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)

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)

Yes, I know, but all pages on Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages articles are published in the online sense, and most are unpublished in the hardcopy sense. — Matt Crypto 19:46, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

DIY

Why not do it yourself? Make your own encyclopaedia website, made up of Misplaced Pages 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)

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

See Misplaced Pages:WikiReader. Allready being done. --Stbalbach 23:13, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Emphatic no!!!!! Lock pages? Then Misplaced Pages would have failed. What a horrible idea! User:Zoe| 03:03, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

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)

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)

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

Namespace

There could even be a wikipedia.org/published/ as opposed to wikipedia.org/. - Fredrik | tc 12:37, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

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)

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 Misplaced Pages 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)

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)

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 Misplaced Pages: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)

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 Misplaced Pages 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)

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)

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)

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, Misplaced Pages 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)

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)

That is similar to Misplaced Pages: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)

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: , 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)

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 Misplaced Pages:Featured revision/Tom Brinkman. And do you mind that Misplaced Pages: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. Misplaced Pages: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)

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)

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)

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 Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Spoken Misplaced Pages). It might be useful to ask there how the version to be recorded is chosen. Kusma (talk) 02:41, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 Misplaced Pages:Requests for Publication/Updates. Kusma (talk) 06:21, 28 November 2005 (UTC)