Let me raise a potentially delicate social issue. :-)
One of the wonderful things about the wiki software, and something
that has served us very well so far, is that it is totally wide open.
I suspect that any significant deviation from that would kill the
magic of the process.
On the other hand, we really are moving into uncharted territory.
Wikipedia is already, as far as I know, the most active and heavily
trafficked wiki to ever exist. It seems a virtual certainty that
the wide open model will start to show some strain (primarily from
vandalism) as we move forward.
(Even now, we see "only" about 5,000 unique visitors a day. Imagine
when that it 50,000 or 150,000. Or more.)
I have this idea that there should be in the software some concept of
"old timer" or "karma points". This would empower some shadowy
mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible
for newbies. Editing the homepage for example. We already had one
instance of very ugly graffiti posted there (a pornographic cartoon).
Some principles that we should use if/when we move in that direction:
1. Cabal membership is available to anyone who puts in time -- there
should be no ability by the part of existing cabal members to
blackball anyone. The reason for this principle is that we don't
want there to be a temptation to ideological blackballing. Anyone
who shows up and sticks around for a couple of weeks can be
trusted enough to give total freedom.
2. Cabal membership should not give anyone any super powers, just a
handful of little things, like locking and unlocking the HomePage,
or placing a temporary block on an IP address or UserID.
3. Newcomers should not have to know or realize that they are
restricted in any way from doing things that some old timers can
do. We should always leave things as open as possible, not
requiring login, registration, etc.
3. Of course, as owner of the physical machine where Wikipedia is
located, I always retain absolute dictatorial power over
everything, if necessary. So if someone gets cabal membership and
uses it to vandalize, I could revoke the status unilaterally.
Basically, I think we always want to make a distinction between true
vandalism and mere un-encyclopedic behavior. We want to develop
little tools and tricks to help us block true vandalism, while keeping
things totally open for people to *work for consensus* on article
content. The "New Age" debate was good and healthy, and never rose to
the level of vandalism.
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