Sounds good, but only a sysop could change that status of the page. Or maybe there could be a cookie identifier on each person's computer so we could track them? The cookie would be blockable.
I see the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and related entries are taking a POV hammering again. TUF-KAT, Zoe, and I have had to do reverts to it to restore balance in the past, and now Cferrero is doing revert duty tonight. A big problem with this stuff is that many of us (I am certainly one) sometimes lack the detailed knowledge to be 100% confident we are reverting POV ranting and not removing real information. (This particular entry has not been too bad so far, no massive edit wars and just one IP ban, but there is a whole class of broadly similar stuff, and this one will serve as an example of the general class as well as any.)
Maybe it is worth considering having a special class of Wikipedia article that is not a completely protected page, but can only be edited by logged-in contributors. I'm not sure if this would work or not, or if it would be practical to implement. I'm just thinking aloud. Any bright ideas out there? Comments?
Tony Wilson (Tannin) list@redhill.net.au
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On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
Sounds good, but only a sysop could change that status of the page. Or maybe there could be a cookie identifier on each person's computer so we could track them? The cookie would be blockable.
Using cookies to track users would not be as effective as you appear to think it is. Altering cookies is a remarkably trivial exercise, only a little more complicated than changing the wallpaper on your computer screen. (Then again, I used to do phone support for the Netscape browser, so maybe it's only trivial to me.)
Perhaps if the relevant token in the cookie were encrypted -- say along the lines of how the password is encrypted in Linux -- then it would discourage all but the most determined attempts to masquerade as the targetted user. But in any case, it would still be trivial for someone like Lir/Vera/Susan to create a new identity by deleting the token when Wikipedia started blocking him/her based on the token in the cookie.
Geoff