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.
Showing viewers who aren't logged in the 10-minute-delay version and logged-in users the current version would be an obvious step as well. Casual users who've read that [[2004 Indian Ocean earthquake]] is a fantastic article will get the 10-minute-delay version, but logged-in editors will understand what vandalism or sandboxing is and that they should fix it.
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.
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.
--Jimbo