Re Todd Allen's remark about raising the threshold for article creation to auto
confirmed: "Copy-pasters, spammers, and vandals will probably largely be put off by
that requirement rather than bothering to fulfill it" is an interesting theory, the
counter view is that vandals and other bad faith editors will do the minimum necessary to
commit their damage, but a proportion of good faith editors will be lost if you make it
more difficult for them.
From my experiences in Wikimedia sites and elsewhere I find the latter theory much more
convincing than the former. So i judge proposals such as ACTrial on the assumption that
they would be a significantly greater deterrent to good editors than to bad ones. Of
course I may be wrong, as might be those who disagree with me.
This is one of those things where a controlled scientific test would be useful - another
is the ongoing divide between those who think it important to template new editors and
their articles as fast as possible in order that they know the flaws in their editing
before they stop editing, and those like me who would like to slow down or better re
channel the effort of templaters on the assumption that the faster they template the
newbies the quicker the newbies will leave.
It is very difficult to achieve consensus for change where large parts of the community
work on diametrically opposed assumptions. Independent neutral research might make it
easier to build consensus and better decisions.
Regards
Jonathan (WereSpielChequers)
On 26 Aug 2014, at 17:06,
wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Copy-pasters, spammers, and vandals will probably largely be put off by
that requirement rather than bothering to fulfill it