First, some pages (e.g. Israel) will probably just have
to permanently be
> protected. Well, maybe you need some sort of intermediate level of
> protection; e.g. only editable by someone who a) has an account, b) has
> it for a month, and c) has made a threshold level of accepted edits. But
> allowing anyone, even someone who's not logged in, to edit them is just
> going to turn into a constant edit war.
This is actually a pretty good idea. I'm always in
favor of finding
ways to turn our blunt instruments into 'softer' tools. What I like
about your proposal here is that it *is* soft. It could be used only
for certain pages marked as 'controversial', and that only *after*
they've become targetted for some kind of mass attack, or if an
ongoing flame war has lasted for months with no hope of resolution.
I think it is a *very* bad idea. It will add another level to the
Wikipedia hiearchy. I'd rather have the sporadic vandals and flame wars
than let that happen. In my utopia every anon should be treated exactly
the same as Jimbo Wales.
Let's just accept the fact that there will always be vandals. They
haven't fucked up WP yet so why worry?
It's like those patriot laws... :-)
BL