On 8/28/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps the time-to-publish could be a dynamic figure based on the age of the editor making the change (anons have age 0, old editors go live faster), the frequency of changes of the page (more frequently edited pages go live faster) and the frequency of page views (less frequently viewed pages go live faster).
The idea being that an anon editing a rarely-edited page should go live slower, to give other editors a chance to see the edit. Maybe 24 hours or more...
Again, I must emphasize that the discussion is premature...
However, even if the software it's set up to liven pages after a certain time and required flagging from a user, we could still do the smart thing and keep the policy out of mediawiki: If we really wanted to go down that path we use a bot to do it without anything other than the basic flagging feature.
We have several bots that read all changes anyways (for vandalism reverting)... and it would be good to keep the policy out of mediawiki so we don't need to bug Brion and Tim to change it. Mechanism not policy... mechanism not policy.
The cool thing is that a bot could apply dynamic heuristics based on not only the user, but the article and the edit as well. So if an anon that makes a very trivial edit to an article which was previously marked non-vandalized, the bot could simply move the pointer. If the anon adds a new image, however... perhaps it waits for a human to do the job. The bot could also watch for pages with edits which have been needs-human-approval for a long time, check the history (and related pages) for past contributors who are currently active, and could leave them notes. "Hey, this article has 5 anon/newuser edits waiting for a week.. you might want to mark them as okay or revert them. Sorry for nagging, I'll leave you alone for a few weeks, or forever if you ask. If you like doing this sort of work, click here and ..."