On 12/18/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 19/12/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
This does make TFA temporarily not-editable, which people have objected to, but I don't know that doing so is necessarily a bad thing given the ongoing highly visible vandalism problem. How many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of visitors have gotten penis pictures so far? 8-(
The real problem is that the featured article often gets a great deal of improvement while it's featured. This does require people to be watching it pretty much continuously for vandalism. It would be much better for the wiki to arrange patrollers rather than make readers' first experience of Wikipedia be an article they can't in fact edit, and I would say it is a worse thing than seeing a picture of a penis.
The only technical solution to vandals is to lock the wiki. That's a really bad thing. Do we really not have patrollers?
I don't like my answer, either. It's certainly not great.
Fundamentally, the problem is that we're having some growth pains resulting in problems which tend to put goals such as "Be a great encyclopedia" in conflict with goals such as "Which everyone can always edit".
I am tending towards the opinion that, as unfortunate as it is, the Featured Article has become an Attractive Nuisance. Legally, in the US, it's normal to assume that the owner of an attractive nuisance bears responsibility to put a fence around it and keep it from hurting people.
I don't like that conclusion, but that's where I'm leaning. I think that it's going to come down to a balance of lesser evils. I am interested in seeing what everyone else thinks about it.
Something that occurred to me a bit ago... We could both freeze and not-freeze the featured article, with a bit of effort. We could create a new name heirarchy (wiki/Featured Article/article-name) and drop a subst'ed version of the page, protected, down into that subpage, with a link to the "live" wiki article there if people want to see how it may have improved over the course of the day. If there's bandwidth available, someone could repeat the process (create an updated frozen subst version from the live wiki page) every hour or two during the TFA run, so it doesn't even have to be fixed as of the beginning of the day.
This doesn't take any new technology, just a few subpages and a bit of procedure...