On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Those examples are also widely used all over the world, including in
regions where the Internet is still new.
Most highly popular services start by letting each participant define
themselves, and the default contribution that people are encouraged to
make is usually permament and not subject to removal by others.
One of the unkind and awkward aspects of the Wikipedia experience is,
that the default requested contribution is an edit, new page, or
upload, all of which may be reverted or followed by warnings and
challenges, by people who expect you to RTFM to learn how to behave.
Some possible improvements:
- add new things that all users are encouraged to contribute
(first-class citizens of the list 'ways to further the project'),
which are entirely within the user's control: information about
themselves and their environment, joining wikiprojects and work
groups, taking part in polls and usability studies, answering
questions from other users and readers
- make a user's contributions permanently visible to them, if not to
others (modulo vandalism), taking advantage of permalinks and file
histories, even when those contribs have for now been removed from the
default public view(s) of an article, or when they have been
quarantined from view by other users for concerns about copyright
status. this improves on the crude tool of deletion and keeps
contributors from feeling that their hard work has been destroyed or
disrespected, often due only to it being incomplete or
not-yet-proven-notable.
- develop better sandboxing policies, tools, and effective sandbox
environments, so that new users can truly experiment and get used to
editing before they are challenged, reverted, deleted, and blocked.
Sam.
Soft deletion. I'm still a fan actually. While we still have way too many
deleted revisions both from before and after oversight and revision deletion
were introduced that are not fit to be seen, I think it would be worth
revisiting a default form of deletion that preserves a public history, and
reserving hard deletion and oversight-ish things for things that really need
to go away forever.
With regard to copyright though, unfortunately, those deletions do need to
be "hard". We can't knowingly let Wikipedia be used as a store for
copyright
violating materials, even if they are stored just for the benefit of one
user, otherwise WMF could face legal liability issues.(Disclaimer: I'm not a
lawyer, just an open source advocate with some personal interest in
copyright law.) However, we should at least preserve a personal record of
those contributions without the actual content, so that the user can
understand why they were removed and learn from it.
-Steph