[WikiEN-l] "the experiment" - did it work?

Wed Jun 21 11:39:16 UTC 2006

On 6/20/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/21/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Absolutely. My long-term vision of a replacement for both protection
> > and semi-protection is "quality protection", where the version you see
> > is the last reviewed one, but the article remains fully editable.
> > Following this strategy, we can make Wikipedia ever more openly
> > editable, continuing the path we have already taken.
> >
> > Erik
>
> Problem is that kills one of wikipedia's main attractions.
>

The implementation is the tricky part.  If you just want to cut out
vandalism things probably wouldn't change much at all.  Users that
weren't logged in would see the latest version not marked as reviewed.
 Changes would likely be marked as reviewed very quickly (depending
how many people had the power to mark as reviewed, which could very
well be something like "just about every logged in user").  If someone
with review power tries to edit a page with unreviewed edits you could
even make first reviewing the change a required step.  One variable
though would be how much review is considered sufficient to mark a
change as reviewed.  Do sources have to be checked, or is just a quick
"this isn't obvious vandalism" check enough?  I suppose the ability to
take away a user's review power without otherwise affecting that user
would be useful for people who make too many review mistakes.

Of course there are more complicated review procedures which would
cause a bigger, longer term split in the article.  These probably
would soften one of the main attractions of Wikipedia, but only one of
them - it might even be worth it.

Anthony