On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 10:12:16 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
In many CMS's there is the concept of a "trusted user", who has privileges to do such things, but is far from being a sysop. It might well be worth looking at a similar idea for wikipedia - which would allow such "judgment calls" to be made by users who have put the time in on wikipedia, but who aren't interested in, and do not need, full sysop privileges.
Note that there is a fine-grained permissions system currently under development in MediaWiki. Theoretically, we will soon be able to have any number of levels of user, or even just grant individual users the rights "we" [the community] feel they deserve. And it's not beyond the realms of possibility that relatively minor privileges (like publishing changes to "semi-protected" pages, perhaps) could be granted to any user account that's existed for X days, or made Y edits, or perhaps submitted an automated request via a Special: page (i.e. you give yourself the rights, implying that you know vaguely what you're doing). See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:User_levels
As somebody pointed out, having a *universal* edit delay (e.g. for all edits by logged out users) would just be frustrating (and confusing) for people who wanted to do passing minor editing. But what Jimbo seems to be suggesting is a kind of "semi-protect" function which triggers such a display *for a particular page*, which seems like a very good idea.