On 8/28/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)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
--
"Think Feynman"/////////