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

Wed Jun 30 20:28:23 UTC 2004

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 02:06:46 UTC, Brion Vibber 
<brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
> > 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.
>  
> Like this?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
>  
> This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the 
> usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.

Nice feature.

I'd like to toss a couple of ideas out, without attachment to the results,
having been on the receiving end of enough "why don't you just program 
this" items to last a lifetime.

These lines could be sorted by the submitter ot the change, turning the 
faceless entities into something resembling people.  At present, of 
course, if an edit looks like vandalism, one can check User Contributions 
to see if that's the user's pattern of behavior; but having the user's 
edits grouped together in this way would encourage looking at them 
together, which would automatically bring out any patterns.

Further: a list of recent edits by randomly selected anons & newbies could
be a sort of alternate watchlist.  When I've made my daily check that the 
articles I know about haven't been crapped on, I click on the alternate 
list, and see what a few random new editors are doing.  Somebody else 
clicks and gets a different list.  If a bunch of people did this, we'd 
have a much improved spotting of new vandals, misguided flaming newbies, 
and astoundingly good new contributors.  It could feed into some kind of 
mentoring, as advocated by Ed Poor. 

If the practice of watching Recent Chagnes is getting overwhelmed by the 
mass of new data, something like this might be a useful replacement.