It's inevitable that some new users will encounter a portion of Wikipeidia that is in a state of disorder, e.g. during an edit war or while one of our more difficult users in actively "editing" it. Hopefully they will be patient and work though the difficulty. Affected pages could, though adjustments to language.pnp put put into a category that would show an uneditable header that made some attempt to explain the phenomena of disorder.
There are several problems: Most of these events are ephemeral, for example, even the article, "Columbus" is not today a focus of attention; soon "Chiropratic medicine" will no longer be a focus of attention; Another problem is that it takes a lot of time and effort to move pages into such a new category and to move them out, and to remember to move them out.
To ignore is simply to quit working the the affected article, to let the SOB have their way. A new user who stumbles on the article and tries to edit will feel the full brunt of the "SOB's" furor as typically almost any change will be met with hostility. This is deplorable, but probably unavoidable.
Fred
From: Jason Williams jason@jasonandali.org.uk Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 09:30:03 +0100 To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] 172--what happened
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:50:52PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
And page protection should just about never be used. It's much healthier to just ignore the page for a while.
And what of the people who come to the 'pedia while it's being ignored?
Perhaps there should be a new option to allow sysops to place a block of protected text at the top of a page. A nice way would be for text above a certain identifier (eg, "<<<<") to only be editable by sysops. This would allow a lighter touch than protecting a page while still indicating that the contents might need some salt added.
-- jason@jasonandali.org.uk http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l