In brief, any solution that narrows down how articles are edited, needs to
consider extremely carefully whether it truly keeps article writing open to
"the world" -- ie
- any good faith editor may contribute to articles with as few exceptions
and restrictions as possible
- good faith editors with different views can stand as "equal editors" in
the discussion
- censorship is kept "difficult" under the new method (no
"bottleneck"
that makes it easy for a minority view to apply control)
- the potential for the editorial environment of these articles to
diverge over time from the project's general community environment is low
(would tend to keep community aligned, porous, and with widely accepted
norms)
FT2
On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 1:39 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The idea of restricting asrticle writing to a small
group ("experienced
article writers" "admins" "veterans" "blp specialists
endorsed by the
community") has been raised before. In principle if the group is made large
enough to not be owned by some small clique and with a suitable policy
guiding how it works and its responsiveness, it's viable without undermining
NPOV and openness.
The crunch point is "open to editing by all", and a large number of users
take that aspect seriously and literally. Philosophically once "open to all"
is drawn back, the same logic applies to any type of article where a person
or group might be unhappy with editing, and there's also a risk that groups
once created tend to gravitate to their own internally developed norms or to
become slightly separated.
Open editing is a major safeguard against Wikipedia being able to be
monopolized by some special interest group, or affected by censorship of
some minority or externally imposed stance. Add a means to limit article
control to some group, and there's always a risk it can be used in future in
other ways.....
Not agreeing or disagreeing, more just outlining the perceived pros cons
and issues.
FT2
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Jay Litwyn <
brewhaha(a)freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> wrote:
Subject-Was: Re: A new solution for the BLP
dilemma
"Nothing new is under the sun", are among the most humbling of a
preacher's words. If you hav ever right-clicked on a file that you uploaded
to your website (and you probably hav one that you are not using), then
clicked on "properties", you would be greeted with this menu of flags, all
within your control:
R W P
e r e
a i r
d t m
e i
t
Owner: X X O
Group: O O O
Everyone: X O O
Those would be appropriate settings for your user page, which is the only
one that the system would let you own. Admins would be owners of all pages
in main: and user: on wikipedia. That way, if you you refused to comply with
one rule or another concerning how user space is used, then an admin would
permit everyone to also be able to write to your space, so that a volunteer
could show you his ignorance of those rules :-) I can almost see the author
of "vandalproof" hanging his head and asking why he did not think of that.
group permission is a special feature of protected file systems. Windows
does not hav group permission in XP, TMK, and it does let you protect shared
objects from being written to. My web server is NetBSD, so it does hav
groups. Users can be added to groups, so that people who hav made
applications for being included in a group -- applications to a sysop would
let you write files in a particular project, because you were a member of
the required group.
In a series of occurances, here is how a biography might become authorized
and get a special stamp of approval from the subject of the biography.
Someone write's a biography about someone else on their user page.
They let it out among their collaborators.
Two of those collaborators want to fix it, so the starter permits everyone
to write to it.
An edit war breaks out, so the sysop (sysops always hav power to permit,
as well as power to destroy, which is not displayed) retracts all
permission, except permission to a group, then assigns three veterans to
that group and solicits their attention to an article in progress.
No blocks are issued.
No significant flaws are in the wording or the evidence.
The page is permitted for reading by all and writing by none.
Occasionally, on the talk page, someone raises {{editprotected}}.
The questions typically get an answer that could hav been found by reading
three months of history.
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