Wikipedia's Wales is considering a "stable" version

March 10, 2006

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that he's considering a "stable" edition of the community-edited encyclopedia, according to an interview with the. The edition would be "a body of work" that has already "been through the community-review process," he proposed.

"The basic idea is that we're going to do a research project to gather feedback on all the articles on the website from the general public. Just a feedback we're going to use for research purposes, first to determine where our strengths and weaknesses are, and then, based on that, we're going to think about what to do as a next step."

With regard to whether this would hurt the democratic spirit of Wikipedia, Wales responded "No, not really. I mean, obviously, we want to be very careful as we change the social model in any way, to not wreck the magic of what works. I guess in that sense it's a concern, but we don't really have any worries about it."

Plans to create stable versions of articles date back for years, with the most serious of discussion happening from fall 2005 on.

To experiment with Wikipedia, The Star submitted a new article on former East York mayor. None of the errors were corrected until after the Star acknowledged the false information.