I don't know if I much like the idea of a "fine-grained" system of user
levels.
It sounds like the beginning of a caste system. Sysops, bureaucrats,
and normal users is one thing and creates fairly little tention, but
what will we do? Have [[Requests for Level 3]] and all the other
levels? When does it become too much of a headache for everybody? I
think the solution of published vs unpublished versions, with
registered users being allowed to edit in real time, is good enough.
If a registered user does something that beyond a sliver of doubt is
vandalism, they can be punished through blocking or banning.
Mark
On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 03:09:31 +0000, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 10:12:16 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry(a)xigenics.net> wrote:
In many CMS's there is the concept of a
"trusted user", who has
privileges to do such things, but is far from being a sysop. It might
well be worth looking at a similar idea for wikipedia - which would
allow such "judgment calls" to be made by users who have put the time
in on wikipedia, but who aren't interested in, and do not need, full
sysop privileges.
Note that there is a fine-grained permissions system currently under
development in MediaWiki. Theoretically, we will soon be able to have
any number of levels of user, or even just grant individual users the
rights "we" [the community] feel they deserve. And it's not beyond the
realms of possibility that relatively minor privileges (like
publishing changes to "semi-protected" pages, perhaps) could be
granted to any user account that's existed for X days, or made Y
edits, or perhaps submitted an automated request via a Special: page
(i.e. you give yourself the rights, implying that you know vaguely
what you're doing). See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:User_levels
As somebody pointed out, having a *universal* edit delay (e.g. for all
edits by logged out users) would just be frustrating (and confusing)
for people who wanted to do passing minor editing. But what Jimbo
seems to be suggesting is a kind of "semi-protect" function which
triggers such a display *for a particular page*, which seems like a
very good idea.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]
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