Wikipedia talk:Stable versions proposal/software mechanisms

message: === 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title: News

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Article validation feature "going live soon" 

message: ===Semi-automation - recent stable version detector===
...I also suggest semi-automation.  "Stable" versions are generally just that: stable; they haven't been edited in a while.  An automated mechanism could go through the history and mark revisions with a tentative measure:
:k * e^(-c*age) * e^(d*[time before next edit])
where c is the decay rate (more recent versions should be prefered) and d is the stability unit.  both c and d could be inferred statistically per article, since some article are edited a lot(high d) and others not-so-much(low d), and some articles are about current events(high c), and some are about dead events(low c).  D is much greater than c (d >> c).
Revisions with a high such measure are candidates for the next "stable" version, to be selected by community approval. Kevin baas 19:37, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Selection automation

message: ...I also suggest semi-automation.  "Stable" versions are generally just that: stable; they haven't been edited in a while.  An automated mechanism could go through the history and mark revisions with a tentative measure:
:k * e^(-c*age) * e^(d*[time before next edit])
where c is the decay rate (more recent versions should be prefered) and d is the stability unit.  both c and d could be inferred statistically per article, since some article are edited a lot(high d) and others not-so-much(low d), and some articles are about current events(high c), and some are about dead events(low c).  D is much greater than c (d >> c).
Revisions with a high such measure are candidates for the next "stable" version, to be selected by community approval. Kevin baas 19:37, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Semi-automation - recent stable version detector