On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
One nice thing about a points system is that if we find ourselves under constant attack, we can just raise the limits.
Moreover, we can simply raise the limits on "old timerhood" if we find that helps solve the vandalism problem. But given that most vandalism is done by people who have done very little editing on Wikipedia, the bar probably won't have to be set very high.
The most important thing is that any hierarchical structure must be based on nothing other than *real participation*, and that it should be as loose as we can possibly manage.
I don't think there should be any hierarchical structure, except to solve very specific, delimited problems like the vandalism problem, and the problem of deciding what articles to promote the "stable" area.
Under no circumstances should there be a hierarchical structure designed to stroke people's egos. :-) Can we agree that egos needing to be inflated is not a problem this sort of structure should be designed to solve?
I have something in mind here like the "strict scrutiny" test that the Supreme Court uses in judging potential restrictions on speech. The restrictions on newbies must be for a compelling community interest (to prevent vandalism) and must be specifically and narrowly tailored to achieve that goal.
I agree 100% with that.
As far as how to get the thing started, we could automatically generate some KP numbers for users by mining existing history data (Say you get a KP for every 5 or 10 page edits you've logged), or we could follow Jimmy Wales's suggestion that we implement the KP log for long enough for some people to gain privileges before marking any pages as requiring privileges to edit, either way should work.
I think it would be fun to see our karma points add up, too, even if they mean nothing. That would allow us to tweak the scoring for awhile, too.
I think we shouldn't keep track of karma points...I don't see what the point would be.