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.