On 8/28/06, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
I have another reason to speak against this. As an editor, I sometimes create an article that is very small, a few words. At the point, I discover a few pages that link to this article and so I know that article has some importance.
Also, stubs are great for attracting attention(!). Sometimes, stubs attract a request for deletion, but in fact the article will grow a reasonable state (see reference below). If deleted, nobody will see it. If hidden from general view, then it will only be seen by the upper class of editors, who may not be aware of the (potential) significance of the article.
This seems to be entirely a question of implementation. Consider, for example, this approach:
When a non-logged-in reader requests a page:
A. If a revision in the article's history has a "not-vandalism" flag set, show that revision as the default (with an option to see the current revision)
B. Otherwise, show the current revision.
In this variation, stubs/new articles/obscure articles that a few people read each year all get shown at the latest version, because nobody will have bothered to mark a particular revision with the flag; it's only on higher-traffic pages -- which, for the most part, would be the ones where vandalism is more prevalent -- that the use of the flag would come into play.
(This quite aside from the fact that de: hasn't yet decided how the ability to set this flag would be assigned; but one of the options Kurt mentioned at Wikimania would be something like the current semi-protection limit on the account's age. The vast majority of active contributors would, in such a scenario, be able to simply set the flag -- perhaps automatically -- on any article they work on.)
At 07:51 -0400 28/8/06, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On 8/28/06, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
I have another reason to speak against this. As an editor, I sometimes create an article that is very small, a few words. At the point, I discover a few pages that link to this article and so I know that article has some importance.
Also, stubs are great for attracting attention(!). Sometimes, stubs attract a request for deletion, but in fact the article will grow a reasonable state (see reference below). If deleted, nobody will see it. If hidden from general view, then it will only be seen by the upper class of editors, who may not be aware of the (potential) significance of the article.
This seems to be entirely a question of implementation. Consider, for example, this approach:
When a non-logged-in reader requests a page:
A. If a revision in the article's history has a "not-vandalism" flag set, show that revision as the default (with an option to see the current revision)
B. Otherwise, show the current revision.
In this variation, stubs/new articles/obscure articles that a few people read each year all get shown at the latest version, because nobody will have bothered to mark a particular revision with the flag; it's only on higher-traffic pages -- which, for the most part, would be the ones where vandalism is more prevalent -- that the use of the flag would come into play.
(This quite aside from the fact that de: hasn't yet decided how the ability to set this flag would be assigned; but one of the options Kurt mentioned at Wikimania would be something like the current semi-protection limit on the account's age. The vast majority of active contributors would, in such a scenario, be able to simply set the flag -- perhaps automatically -- on any article they work on.)
-- Kirill Lokshin
Automatically set the flag? OK. I can see that.
Gordo
On 28/08/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
(This quite aside from the fact that de: hasn't yet decided how the ability to set this flag would be assigned; but one of the options Kurt mentioned at Wikimania would be something like the current semi-protection limit on the account's age. The vast majority of active contributors would, in such a scenario, be able to simply set the flag -- perhaps automatically -- on any article they work on.)
That strikes me as the only way to make such a thing neither sclerotic nor (complex enough to be) gameable.
- d.