[Foundation-l] User Rights

Fri Jun 18 19:26:25 UTC 2004

--- Corey Burger <cburger at victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
> Key Rights:
> Anons will always be able to edit existing article, period
> 
> 
> User name rights:
> Users can always edit pages
> After (a period of time, I choose an arbitrary one say 1 week), users can
> move pages and create new pages
> 
> Thus Anons cannot move or create new pages, which from my New Page watch
> would probably be a good thing.

We may have to eventually do this. But we absolutely need to make sure we only
do it if/when it is needed - just as we had to do when we protected the Main
Page on the English Wikipedia. I would like to see some statistics on the
number of junk and copyvio pages anons and new users create each day to see if
we have reached that point yet. Some measure of how long it takes for almost
all of that to get fixed would also be needed in order to run some cost/benefit
analysis. 

Wiki is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But we should nevertheless try
to preserve as much openness as is useful for as long as it is practical. 

We cannot assume that our current way of doing things will scale indefinitely -
there is only a small percentage of the world's population who would ever care
to become Wikimedians. After we have reached a significant percentage of them
it will become increasingly difficult to keep up with those who would rather
vandalize or contribute crap. In the meantime we should put the onus of proof
on those who want to lock things down. If what they say is true, then they
should be able to prove it fairly easily. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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