[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

Wed Jun 30 02:02:43 UTC 2004

On 06/29/04 23:26, Denni wrote:

> I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be screened,
> similarly to VfDs, for the first few weeks or first few dozens worth of
> posts. The software is in place to track x number of posts and shunt
> those not meeting certain criteria through to a fastedit page; while
> newbies/anons can edit in what seems to be a transparent manner to them,
> Wikipedia can also monitor for malicious edits, edits made out of
> ignorance (an article submitted intended as a userpage, for instance,
> that ends up in article namespace), or edits made similarly (as was my
> error - editing the article instead of its related talk page).

This is a technical solution to what is, after all, a social problem.
Worse, it's a harsh and exclusionary one.

Let me suggest an alternative:

The above requires someone to care to check the newbie/anon queue.
As such, let's assume we have sufficient people on hand who care about
this enough to do it.

Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let
them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create
a special: page specifically to display those contributions.

Then the sufficient people to monitor this stuff will have technical
help in doing so, and we would have avoided putting a restriction on
the wiki we could do without.

What do you think?

(I have no idea if this would be easy or hard or what to code. I can
see it being very useful. Though I doubt I'd be monitoring it a whole
lot myself.)

This should probably be discussed on wikipedia-l, not wiki-en - I've
crossposted it there and set reply-to there.

- d.