[WikiEN-l] semi-stuff (was Re: New York Times article)

Thu Jun 22 10:27:56 UTC 2006

On 6/22/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> We've all seen users completely blocked because of a regrettable
> tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war.  Now, they
> could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about
> copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being
> supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free
> to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on
> treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for
> admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins.  In that last case, Curps'
> bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable.
>
> It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing
> obnoxious things without blocking them completely.  We shouldn't have to
> block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible.

While this sounds like a good idea in theory, I think the model of
having a class of users *less* empowered than the default class is
unworkable. They would obviously simply create new accounts when they
had these priveleges taken away from them. The only way to do it would
be to provide these privileges after some number of edits/days with
the project, and revoke them as needed. I suppose it *could* work with
editors who have invested a lot in their username...

Steve