1) Delayed editing: Something that has been talked
about and wanted for
years. This would give
admins to the ability to soft-protect pages that are frequent targets of
vandalism (such as
[[George W. Bush]] on the English Wikipedia). Ideally this feature would
automatically delay edits
by anons and new users and post them, again automatically, after an amount
of time that was set by
an admin for that page (similar to setting IP/user name block time
periods). This would give RC
patrolers time to cancel vandalistic edits before they are posted for all
to see. But last I heard
this feature (so far) would require a great deal of manual effort by
admins; one would need to set
versions manually and I do not think the feature distinguishes between
anons, new users or old
users. I personally think that this feature should not go live until it is
fully functional (esp
since it is way too similar, as is, to the below feature). The point of
this feature is to help
avoid displaying vandalism.
Mmm, yes. This is exactly like the new Encarta proposal. Do people not
realise how anti-Wiki delayed editing is? The *core* values, the ones that
are constantly advertised for Wikipedia, is that "anyone can edit it" and
"edits are displayed immediately".
Neil also mentioned that the policy can always be changed back, and that
there is always the chance of forking the project. Forking would be the
destruction of Wikipedia, since it would basically form two competing
communities. As Neil said:
The virtue of the multi-version approach is that it allows both the
"pure-Wiki" and the "sifter"
approaches at once, but without forking the
project.
Exactly. That is, pure-Wiki would be compromised. People would view the
stable versions *first* and then maybe look over the draft editable
versions. That automatically changes Wikipedia's nature by a huge margin.
Ronline