I am anonymizing this complaint, but I wanted to point it out to people and to point out that complaints of this type are increasingly common. As we get more and more popular, vandalism of popular articles, though corrected very very quickly, is also seen by more and more people.
My technical proposal to deal with this (and I did not invent this idea, I don't know who did, but it has been floating around) is a new form of page semi-protection for extremely popular/important articles.
Basically, pages in this case will have a published form and a working form. The working form automatically becomes the published form whenever one of two conditions is satisfied:
1. X minutes has passed with no new edits 2. A sysop forces publication immediately
'X' can be left variable, but for most cases I think 10 minutes would suffice. We might experiment with longer pauses for articles in cases other than "popular + vandalism", for example as a new approach to dealing with traditional edit wars in at least some cases.
For the user interface, when an article is in such a state, it looks totally normal at the usual url. But instead of 'edit this page' you see 'live version'. Click on that, and you're at the live version, warts and all, and you can operate normally from there.
I think this solution is softer than our current solution, which is just to protect the article. George W. Bush was protected for 8 days during the height of the election season because pranksters kept putting goatse.cx images, etc., on the article.
This option would give us 10 minutes to deal with vandalism, and would give us the opportunity to keep working on the article as well.
--Jimbo
p.s. In case someone thinks the 'sysop forces publication immediately' is somehow unfair, note that it is necessary to prevent a denial of service attack once a bit of vandalism *does* slip through, which is inevitable. That is, if someone managed to get vandalism on an important page, they could prevent others from removing it by simply repeatedly touching the page within the 10 minute window.
The 'sysop force' means that responsible people can get a sensible version back live. We can make clear that sysops are only supposed to do this in the case of vandalism, not just because they don't like the way the article is written.
----- Forwarded message from heather hudak heatherhudak@yahoo.com -----
From: heather hudak heatherhudak@yahoo.com Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 06:52:46 -0800 (PST) To: jwales@wikia.com Subject: Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article
Hi Jimmy,
I often visit Wikipedia for info. I find it reasonably credible and it has a large amount of information. This morning, I was looking for a quick bite about Tsunamis. I was greeted by the used of the word "f*ckers" etc., numerous times throughout the text all the way to end of the article. It seems someone is playing a bit of a nasty gag on your site. It also takes away from the credibility Wikipedia has achieved. The following is the link at which I found this information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
This is disturbing to find at any site, about any topic, but expecially a topic that encompasses so much devastation.
While I am a young, reasonable business woman, I am not necessarily offended by this, I just think it is highly inappropriate and will likely deter me from trusting Wikipedia information in the future. I use the site very frequently (daily), and I can't imagine that will continue. Prior to this, I was unaware that Wikipedia received submissions from outside sources. This situation encouraged me to learn more and trust less. I hope you will look into ways to prevent this sort of obscene language from penetrating the information on your web site.
Sincerely, Heather Hudak
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