[WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls

Tue Feb 10 08:26:29 UTC 2004

Sheldon Rampton wrote:
>Personally, I think Wikipedia should try to 
>move away from deterrence strategies like 
>bans, IP blocks and arbitration committees, 
>and toward a reputation-management 
>system like they have at Slashdot or Kuro5hin 
>or eBay. 

Oh god no!  Slashdot and *especially* Kuro5hin are a haven for trolls, rude
behavior, and giving the feeling to newbies that the deck is stacked against
them. We don't want to replicate that! 

>[a system based on trust]...

A developer mentioned trust matrices once and I thought that was a neat idea.
But having an RC that only had anon edits and edits by new logged-in users
would be a very helpful start. We could even reset the accounts of certain
problem users so that their edits would go into that RC as well.

That combined with a more cooperative way to search for vandalism and other
problem edits would be enough for some time, IMO. As it is now many people
waste a lot of time rechecking edits that have already been checked by other
people. 

>I think it would also be a good idea to set some kind 
>of limit on the number of contributions accepted per 
>day from each anonymous IP number -- a fairly small 
>number, such as 5. Five contributions is enough for 
>someone to get a feel for how Wikipedia works. 

Please no. For a while my browser and Slashdot just didn't get along. So I
posted as an anon. After 10 posts I got a message saying to "Slow down cowboy -
you need to log in to post more". I was a bit pissed. 

But anons and new users do have a tendency to save without first previewing. I
would therefore support the removal of the Save button from the initial edit
screens presented to anons. Only after they previewed once would they be
presented with the save button. 

That alone should cut down on much of the simple vandalism from anons without
putting any real limit on their ability to edit. 

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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