The Wikipedia promise is "edit this page."
But I don't think the promise of zero-threshold _editing_ should automatically be a promise of zero-threshold article _creation._
_Most_ people get their feet wet with simple edits, giving a chance to get acculturated before taking the leap to creating an article. People whose first edit is the creation of an article are, I think, showing _too_ bold a temperament.
Many online communities have a provision whereby new users' messages are automatically moderated initially and only removed from moderation after they've posted a small number of acceptable messages.
Suppose we had a level of privilege called, say "contributor." Anons and non- contributors could edit articles just as they do now, but only contributors could create an article _and have it appear immediately in the main namespace._
Articles contributed by non-contributors would go to a "moderated" area. These article would not appear in the namespace until a contributor made at least one edit to them. That is, an article is approved by making a single edit to it. The reason for requiring one edit for approval would be to strongly encourage contributors not to mindlessly approve marginal articles.
I'm thinking that it should be extremely easy to become a contributor. I'm thinking that the requirement should be a) contributors must have user names, and b) users with accounts get contributor status automatically as soon as their first new article is approved.
On 10/25/05, dpbsmith@verizon.net dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
The Wikipedia promise is "edit this page."
But I don't think the promise of zero-threshold _editing_ should automatically be a promise of zero-threshold article _creation._
_Most_ people get their feet wet with simple edits, giving a chance to get acculturated before taking the leap to creating an article. People whose first edit is the creation of an article are, I think, showing _too_ bold a temperament.
Many online communities have a provision whereby new users' messages are automatically moderated initially and only removed from moderation after they've posted a small number of acceptable messages.
Suppose we had a level of privilege called, say "contributor." Anons and non- contributors could edit articles just as they do now, but only contributors could create an article _and have it appear immediately in the main namespace._
Articles contributed by non-contributors would go to a "moderated" area. These article would not appear in the namespace until a contributor made at least one edit to them. That is, an article is approved by making a single edit to it. The reason for requiring one edit for approval would be to strongly encourage contributors not to mindlessly approve marginal articles.
I'm thinking that it should be extremely easy to become a contributor. I'm thinking that the requirement should be a) contributors must have user names, and b) users with accounts get contributor status automatically as soon as their first new article is approved.
It's not a bad idea, but the design is overly complicated, especially the part about the moderated area. I think the moderated area would cause too many arguments and finger pointing, as well as be difficult to implement in code and bloat the mediawiki software. Why not just take away the ability of new users and non-users to create new articles? Much simpler to implement, and it'd cause a lot fewer arguments. Anthony
dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
The Wikipedia promise is "edit this page."
But I don't think the promise of zero-threshold _editing_ should automatically be a promise of zero-threshold article _creation._
_Most_ people get their feet wet with simple edits, giving a chance to get acculturated before taking the leap to creating an article. People whose first edit is the creation of an article are, I think, showing _too_ bold a temperament.
A side-effect of making hoops for creation while leaving addition wide open is that you incentivize new people to glue their material into existing articles even if that doesn't make much sense. So you'll have bios tacked onto the existing town articles (birthplaces), chemist bios including the full info on the compounds they studied, and so forth. Even in the cases where merging might make sense, the new editor won't be able to create the necessary redirs either, so the uncreated articles continue to be redlinks and offer no hint that the content already exists in some other article (or maybe even replicated in several articles).
I've gamed out a few similar schemes of my own, and in general it works out that there's little advantage to making substantive distinctions between creation and modification.
Stan