[Wikipedia-l] Getting rid of protected pages

Tue Jan 7 21:55:00 UTC 2003

Because Cunctator would forward it to wikipedia-l anyway, I'm posting this  
here directly instead of to wikitech-l (help! he's conditioning me!).  
There is a discussion on [[Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view]] about  
whether this particular page should be protected or not. Actually nobody  
seems to argue strongly that it should be protected, but right now it  
still is.

Brion has brought up an idea from the good folks at MeatballWiki:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?FileReplacement

The gist of it, as I think it *should* be implemented, is this:

1) Protected pages have a link called "Editable copy" or something  
similar. This is simply a copy of the page, perhaps with some flag in the  
database or a modifier in the page title like "(COPY)".

2) This page can be edited freely. After every edit, a timer is reset. The  
timer counts down to, say, 2 hours (we may want to define this on a per- 
site or per-page basis). Once the time has elapsed, the original version  
of the page is replaced with the COPY.

Because the timer is reset any time someone edits the page, regular users  
can prevent the page from being substituted with vandalism if no sysop is  
near. Similarly, edit wars are given time to "cool" before the page in  
question changes.

3) Sysops have the additional privileges of being able to directly replace  
the original page with the COPY (so as to say, "this version is good,  
gimme this NOW"), and of course, of being able to edit the original page  
directly.

Using this system we could get rid of traditional page protection for all  
pages, including [[Main Page]] and the sensitive policy pages. As an added  
feature, we could wipe the history of the COPY whenever it is copied; this  
would save some disk space when we use this mechanism to prevent edit wars  
(every "revert" is a full copy of the page in the DB).

The Main Page of all language wikis would benefit greatly from this, as it  
could now be updated by everyone without the risk of the goat-man suddenly  
appearing on our frontpage.

What do you think? With the possible exception of the timer part, I  
believe this would be relatively simple to implement.

Regards,

Erik