[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article]

Sun Jan 9 20:19:44 UTC 2005

Warning: this e-mail is [probably unnecessary] rather long; sorry, I
seem to be in "verbose" mode. :-/

On Sat, 08 Jan 2005 12:55:00 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> But I do not really see how what I propose in against wiki principles
> while to my opinion, the time delay is and will be confusing. Or that
> means I really do not understand Jimbo's proposal. In any cases, I do
> not like it :-(

Well, I'm not 100% sure that everybody's sure what proposals they're
talking about, but *my* understanding is:

Jimbo proposed a software feature that allowed a page to remain
editable by any user, but with ["untrusted"?] edits not visible [to
certain people, e.g. "anons"] until they have remained unchallenged
for a certain time, *or* explicitly approved by a "trusted" user
[where "trusted" may be a user level somewhere between logged in and
sysop, possibly available to anyone with "enough" experience]. This
could replace, in certain circumstances, the current practice of
protecting the page from *any* editting, and therefore *increase* the
"wikiness" of the wiki.

The most confusing element of this proposal is that people may come to
the site, try to correct an error, and find it has already been
corrected by someone else, but is stuck in the time delay [the
software can display a message explaining that this is an exceptional
measure, but that's still confusing]. But depending on the exact
details - how long before automatic publication, how many users able
to manually "approve" a new version - this may be a very unlikely
occurence. Note that this is only intended for the specific case of
articles that are, for instance, in the news, and likely to receive a
lot of attention; by their very nature, these articles are likely to
be on plenty of watchlists etc, so people will be likely to "approve"
good changes well before the time limit. And if they don't, the edit
will go through anyway, and the "live" and "current" versions will
match.

[To develop from Jimbo's description a bit, I think users could
perhaps be presented with an edit box straight away, but with a big
note about the article being in "deferred mode" (or whatever). If (and
only if) the "current" version is not the same as the "live" version,
the note could be followed by a diff between the two, with an
additional note/reminder to check that the change hadn't already been
made.]

Anthere, OTOH, proposed that in similar situations, pages could be
protected, but editable via templates, as a deliberate confusion
tactic. In my personal opinion, this would be far *more* confusing
than a [well designed] "deferred edit" feature in the software. I
would also note that it has been used for some time on the Front page
of the en: WP, with only limited success - it confuses a lot of people
who want to make genuine changes, and yet the front page still
receives vandalism [albeit a no doubt reduced amount]. There has been
much discussion of whether the templates themselves should now be
protected, but it looks like this has been avoided for the time being.

Basically, I think some intermediate state (or even more than one!) is
needed between "editable" and "protected", and however tricksy we are,
this can only really be achieved by a carefully designed software
feature. "Deffered edits" are actually *less* restrictive than the
other alternative that might be worth considering - that of protecting
pages *but allowing more than just admins to edit them* (i.e.
edittable by "trusted users", however we want to define that).

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]