[Wikipedia-l] Re: Erik's team certification proposal

Sat Nov 16 20:20:11 UTC 2002

I'm still seeing way too many similarities between having multiple themed 
Sifter groups and Erik's team certification proposal. What is the putpose of 
Erik's idea? From what I gather it is to create selections of articles that 
have been reviewed by different groups. Each group would have its own rules 
on certification and on who they decide should be group members. These 
members would "certify" certain articles based upon those criteria and then a 
list of articles certified by any particular group would be automatically 
generated. Heck, this can be done right now without any change to the 
software so long as group members manually added articles to a list. 

Sifter will be doing the /exact/ same thing except instead of compiling a 
list, particular article versions are automatically copied to a separate 
static website. There is no reason why a log of articles that have been 
uploaded by any particular Sifter group couldn't be generated and available 
at Wikipedia. 

One of the great things, it was thought, about Sifter was that /no/ changes 
would have to be made to PediaWiki for it to work. But Erik wants to change 
the software anyway to do a very similar thing from within Wikipedia. So why 
not marry the two ideas and get the best of both worlds? Then when somebody 
visits a Wikipedia article that has been reviewed they will be able to see 
that at least a previous version had been reviewed. They would also be 
presented a link to a static copy of the certified version (with maybe a diff 
link so that the person can easily compare it with the current Wikipedia 
version). I don't think this is possible with the "hands-off Wikipedia" 
version of Sifter.

The trouble with Erik's certification idea is that people still can't rely on 
certified articles because somebody could completely replace a certified 
article with another version right after it is certified. Sifter versions are 
stable and therefore something that can be trusted (so long as you trust the 
quality and reputation of the Sifter member that certified the article and 
Sifter group that the member belongs to). 

And as soon as there are a certain number of certified articles for any 
particular themed Sifter group, then a CD can be made of that selection -- no 
need to recheck each article for vandalism or rubbish that has been added 
since certification.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS I probably missed some points or even misrepresented Erik's certification 
idea. If this is the case, I apologize in advance and please do correct me 
Erik (I can't find your original email on this).