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