On 21/06/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
In addition, a pseudonym is more anonymous than an IP address.
It's also less anonymous though; wherever a pseudonym is used, we know it's the *same* people, where an anonymous IP address is used it could be anyone behind a NAT'd gateway.
Before, it was possible to tell that user X came from school network Y. Now you have to do a CheckUser to get the user's IP. The Seigenthaler vandal was identified because he was an unregistered user.
Right. IP addresses are very useful.
GerardM also has some great ideas how we can build better authentication into our software, so that, for instance, we know that certain IP addresses are untrusted, and instead of blocking them entirely, we allow users who are authenticated _within_ a school or university to use that authentication in Wikipedia.
Yes, it doesn't make sense right now that a logged in user on a anonymous IP address can't edit the wikipedia. Recently there was a weird internet routing problem and I found that there was no direct route to the wikipedia, but I could log in fine via a proxy server, but couldn't edit. Given that the wikipedia knew it was me, that behaviour is *broken*.
Absolutely. My long-term vision of a replacement for both protection and semi-protection is "quality protection", where the version you see is the last reviewed one, but the article remains fully editable. Following this strategy, we can make Wikipedia ever more openly editable, continuing the path we have already taken.
I definitely agree, but I think the nupedia experiment tells us that formal reviews are bad for the wikipedia though.
The problem is they never time out; you could be waiting for a formal review forever- there's nothing forcing it through. There's no pressure on the reviewers. I mean, if the wikipedia tells us anything it's that if most edits to something improve an article, then the article will improve over time; so the first version doesn't have to be particularly good, because it will converge to excellence.
So we need to put pressure on the reviewers- how's this as an idea for the most lightweight scheme for reviewing?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Timed_article_change_stabilisation_me...
(summary: the idea is that newbie edits don't go live for a day or so, to allow more experienced editors to check it over.)
But beyond that, we need to come up with simple mechanisms to divide trust between well established users; for example how can new users get disadvantaged when creating a new article, but in a way that still allows them to create articles?
If a new user (with say, less than 100 edits) creates an article, should it go live immediately or should there be a cooling off period of say, a week, to give the established editors a chance to check it over? Just adding a delay discourages lots of bad guys I think; no immediate gratification.
Erik