On 6/22/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
We've all seen users completely blocked because of
a regrettable
tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war. Now, they
could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about
copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being
supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free
to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on
treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for
admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins. In that last case, Curps'
bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable.
It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing
obnoxious things without blocking them completely. We shouldn't have to
block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible.
While this sounds like a good idea in theory, I think the model of
having a class of users *less* empowered than the default class is
unworkable. They would obviously simply create new accounts when they
had these priveleges taken away from them. The only way to do it would
be to provide these privileges after some number of edits/days with
the project, and revoke them as needed. I suppose it *could* work with
editors who have invested a lot in their username...
Steve