Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales (jwales@wikia.com) [050108 03:29]:
David Gerard wrote:
I would however advise taking *extreme care* to be sure it's actually vandalism - a lot of it will just be sandboxing, i.e. "I can edit this page? Huh? Let's see ... uh. I can. Um, what do I do now?"
Well said. Sandboxing is *good*, I mean, *ahem* it would be nice if people had a clue to try it somewhere other than a hugely popular page, but we can't hardly blame people for it. I mean, most of them probably don't *believe* they can edit the page. Hmm, "edit this page"? What? <click> edit box? That's weird. "blah blah blah"
<click> Whoaaaa! Wikipedia is insane, so of course people don't believe it.
c.f. Clay Shirky's five stages of Wikipedia grief ;-)
I suppose the edit message for anon users should say something like "As an anonymous editor, your edits will take up to 10 minutes to show on the live wiki. If you were just experimenting, click _here_ to revert to the version before your experiment, and try experimenting in the _Sandbox_."
Excellent suggestion.
I'm not familiar with the code, so I dunno if this is in fact easier - but if making the 10-minute delay feature seems a bit of a big goal in these busy and trying times, then perhaps text something like the above "If you were just experimenting" text - with a self-reversion link - could show up after an anon edit.
(Of course, this assumes AOL doesn't switch them to a different proxy between clicks or something ...)
The up-to-10-minute delay would I hope not hurt our Wiki nature too much. Is there anyone who disagrees, or has qualms?
A valid point here is that the 10 minute delay should actually be viewed as a step *back* to wiki nature. Because what we end up doing right now is protecting pages.. a very brutal measure if we can think of something more creative and open.
With luck we can get rid of protection for mere vandalism.
- d.