[WikiEN-l] Improve quality by reviewing all new articles

Fri Dec 16 14:37:51 UTC 2005

Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>
> As an aside, would the user who clicks the "publish" button find
> herself legally liable for the content of that article?  I certainly
> could see an argument for that being the case.  Whether or not that'd
> be a good thing or a bad thing is another unanswered question.
>
> Anthony
>
>   
This problem could probably be avoided by _not_ providing a "publish" 
button at all, but instead only a "deprecate/delete" voting button, and 
automatically moving articles from the new-article queue to the main 
article space after, say, an hour after creation if they are not shot 
down first. An hour is probably plenty of time, given a queue system to 
ensure that articles do not fall through the cracks, and the current 
number of people doing RC patrol.

I like the idea that new articles could be made visible to logged-on 
users only, until they are moved to the main article space -- the 
introduction of logged-on-user-only article creation now removes any 
need to make the article visible to IP-only users creating their own 
articles. Not making queued articles visible to IP-only readers would 
also have the effect of making them invisible to web crawlers and 
real-time proxy-leeching sites, and hence less likely to appear in 
Wikipedia mirrors.

Similarly, it would be a good idea to avoid backing up new articles on 
the queue to article database dumps, which would further reduce the 
possibility of their being picked up by syndicators.

An RSS feed of the new article queue would be useful, too.

-- Neil