[WikiEN-l] newbie culture

Mon Jun 19 07:46:13 UTC 2006

John Lee wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> 
>>It would be good if we could put users on probation. Occasionally I've
>>taken the effort to track a vandal, watching and reverting their
>>edits. But it would be nice to be able to say "this user's next edit
>>is 90% likely to be vandalism, hence, let's screen it *before* it goes
>>live". All the edits of probationary users could appear on one screen,
>>and people watching that list could pick out the occasional good ones
>>to let through, much like moderating a mailing list.
> 
> This is something of a perennial proposal. The main problem I see with 
> it is the potential for edit conflicts - if a valid edit goes through 
> between when the probationary edit is made, and when it is approved, 
> there might be trouble merging the two edits together.

The technical side could actually be handled rather easily: all we need 
is a way to tag a specific revision as the visible one.  If the visible 
version isn't the latest, and someone tries to edit it, they get the 
same (or similar) warning as when editing an old revision in general.

"You are editing the stable version of this page. If you save it, any 
unreviewed changes made since this version will be removed."

(In fact, it might be possible to use the existing page_latest column 
for this, though I haven't really checked.)

-- 
Ilmari Karonen