On Fri, 14 May 2004 19:47:58 -0700, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I think you've hit on the crux of the matter: if wik were merely an edit-warrior who got into fights everywhere, he would've been banned long ago.
This is no doubt true.
It's true some of his edit count is due to edit wars, but some of it is also due to simply being a very prolific editor with apparently a lot of time to devote to Wikipedia, much of it on relatively uncontroversial topics. Sometimes he also turns out to be right in his disputes, and his opponents use tactics no better than his, which further complicates things.
I think in general Wik's behavior isn't a major problem in terms of actual behavior,
I disagree. When Wik's behaviour drives off respected members of the Wikipedia community such as [User:Tannin], it is a problem for us all.
Wik has made some useful edits. Unfortunately he also has a very abrasive manner. This means that his behaviour often annoys other Wikipedians, who are sometimes as a consequence discouraged from further contributing to Wikipedia as a consequence.
It seems to me that the amount of good edits Wik has made may well be less than the number of good edits other people have been discouraged from making as a consequence of Wik's actions. If this is the case, then Wik's overall effect is a negative one.
The structural change is something that occasionally gets proposed but hasn't been detailed to anyone's satisfaction yet. The main issue is how we can make things less "fragile" without also losing the characteristic "anyone can edit any page" nature of Wikipedia.
I'm not sure that's possible.
Personally, I wouldn't be against losing some of that for more-established pages---once an article has been hashed out over a period of a year or two by hundreds of people, the ability for anyone to change anything seems to do more harm than good.
That may well be the case. Consider how the front page has been protected, to stop vandals.
In fact, most major edits to something like, say, [[Israel]] will be reverted anyway unless there is plenty of talk-page discussion about each point first, so maybe it wouldn't hurt to make this restriction more technically-based.
Where there are contentious pages -- of which [[Israel]] is one -- then perhaps the software could explicitly mark them as contentious and deal with them differently from normal pages.
For example, how about a rule that contentious pages can only be edited by logged-in users whose accounts have been active for at least one month?