Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
It's true that you could make minor changes to formatting, but those changes do not provide enough benefit to counteract the waste of time and resources caused by vandalism.
I totally agree and I think what Angela said is valid here as well: this type of page isn't all that suited for a wiki, so we should have really no qualms about just protecting the page and being done with it.
That page was in fact protected soon after the issue was raised. Unlike in strictly textual pages it can be difficult to recognize the difference between corrections and subtle vandalism in a numerical page.
I'd say the same thing about a *lot* of things on wikisource. At some point fairly early in the development of a source article, protection is a wise option. Probably the protection message should make it very clear to people that if they have a real change to make, the article can easily be unprotected.
Thus far, vandalism at Wikisource (or even Wiktionary) has not been overwhelming. Perhaps the size of Wikipedia combined with the short attention span of most common vandals helps the smaller projects to stay below the radar. The texts in Wikisource have remained remarkably stable, but I would not hesitate to impose protection if there were a consistent trend to act silly. Once a text is in place most of the editing activity tends to relate to such secondary things as format, categories, introductory or other connective material. We would dream too that at some point we would be better able to handle annotations and translations through a system of closely associated pages.
Deferral of the issue of multiple domains, has already inspired some people to look for imaginative ways of treating multilingual access. It is much too early to tell which of these experiments will be successful, but the clutter of dead-end attempts seems a small price to pay. Those that are true failures can be easily removed when the passion for them has gone away. These experiments will develop more naturally in an easily editable context, but vigilance will need to continue.
To the extent that protection may be required, I will look into a developing a suitable protection message.
But it seems silly for anyone to have to pull their hair out fighting vandalism on a page that *could not possibly* be improved anyway, because it is already accurate.
Agreed.
Ec