This would be nice

[Max A.]

On 10/3/06, N. J. A. Sloane <njas at research.att.com> wrote:
> Would this increase or decrease the number of Comments?
> Right now there are so many that I can scarely keep up.

Neil,

The OEIS becomes better and better with each comment/correction, doesn't it?
So, having more comments is good, in theory at least. In practice,
there should be an effective way to process growing number of
comments, and it seems that the OEIS is lacking for one.

I'm sorry to say that again but WiKi-powered OEIS would benefit a lot
in many senses including (but not limited to) ease of
editing/commenting existing entries, effectiveness of
reviewing/approving such comments, reducing your and (other OEIS
editors') load in maintaining the database, etc. etc.

I remember there was a major counterargument last time that WiKi is
not suitable for the OEIS since WiKi allows anybody to do anything
with the database while the OEIS must be as accurate as possible all
the time. But there is a simple solution: let it be two databases
instead of one, call them "development" and "production".
The production DB will be what everybody see and can search in. It
will be r/o for general public. At the same time, it will provide
[Edit] link to each entry, and this link will redirect to the
corresponding entry in the development DB (with ability to edit it).
All changes that a visitor makes will go to the development DB but not
to the production one. Later you (and other OEIS maintainers) will be
able to easily review entries that differ in the production and
development DBs, and at your discretion to approve each of the changed
entries (in which case the entry will be copied from the development
DB into the production DB), to reject it (in which case the entry in
the development DB will be restored from the production DB), or to
edit it yourself as necessary.

Regards,
Max