[WikiEN-l] Grown-ups and children

Mon Mar 7 21:30:34 UTC 2005

Uncle Ed, while your plan for guiding Wikipedia by a few trusted users which
just so happens to include you is very exciting to me, a largely unknown
contributor (i.e., child) who contributes hours a day to Wikipedia, I think
Jimbo's Statement of principles may prove thorny:

2. Newcomers are always to be welcomed. There must be no cabal, there must
be no elites, there must be no hierarchy or structure which gets in the way
of this openness to newcomers. Any security measures to be implemented to
protect the community against real vandals (and there are real vandals, who
are already starting to affect us), should be implemented on the model of
"strict scrutiny".
"Strict scrutiny" means that any measures instituted for security must
address a compelling community interest, and must be narrowly tailored to
achieve that objective and no other.

For example: rather than trust humans to correctly identify "regulars", we
must use a simple, transparent, and open algorithm, so that people are
automatically given full privileges once they have been around the community
for a very short period of time. The process should be virtually invisible
for newcomers, so that they do not have to do anything to start contributing
to the community.