On 06/29/04 23:26, Denni wrote:
I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be screened, similarly to VfDs, for the first few weeks or first few dozens worth of posts. The software is in place to track x number of posts and shunt those not meeting certain criteria through to a fastedit page; while newbies/anons can edit in what seems to be a transparent manner to them, Wikipedia can also monitor for malicious edits, edits made out of ignorance (an article submitted intended as a userpage, for instance, that ends up in article namespace), or edits made similarly (as was my error - editing the article instead of its related talk page).
This is a technical solution to what is, after all, a social problem. Worse, it's a harsh and exclusionary one.
Let me suggest an alternative:
The above requires someone to care to check the newbie/anon queue. As such, let's assume we have sufficient people on hand who care about this enough to do it.
Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
Then the sufficient people to monitor this stuff will have technical help in doing so, and we would have avoided putting a restriction on the wiki we could do without.
What do you think?
(I have no idea if this would be easy or hard or what to code. I can see it being very useful. Though I doubt I'd be monitoring it a whole lot myself.)
This should probably be discussed on wikipedia-l, not wiki-en - I've crossposted it there and set reply-to there.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 02:06:46 UTC, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.
Nice feature.
I'd like to toss a couple of ideas out, without attachment to the results, having been on the receiving end of enough "why don't you just program this" items to last a lifetime.
These lines could be sorted by the submitter ot the change, turning the faceless entities into something resembling people. At present, of course, if an edit looks like vandalism, one can check User Contributions to see if that's the user's pattern of behavior; but having the user's edits grouped together in this way would encourage looking at them together, which would automatically bring out any patterns.
Further: a list of recent edits by randomly selected anons & newbies could be a sort of alternate watchlist. When I've made my daily check that the articles I know about haven't been crapped on, I click on the alternate list, and see what a few random new editors are doing. Somebody else clicks and gets a different list. If a bunch of people did this, we'd have a much improved spotting of new vandals, misguided flaming newbies, and astoundingly good new contributors. It could feed into some kind of mentoring, as advocated by Ed Poor.
If the practice of watching Recent Chagnes is getting overwhelmed by the mass of new data, something like this might be a useful replacement.
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 20:28:23 +0000 (UTC) "Dan Drake" dd@dandrake.com wrote:
These lines could be sorted by the submitter ot the change, turning the faceless entities into something resembling people. At present, of course, if an edit looks like vandalism, one can check User Contributions to see if that's the user's pattern of behavior; but having the user's edits grouped together in this way would encourage looking at them together, which would automatically bring out any patterns.
I already submitted something similar to Sourceforge Feature Requests a few weeks ago: A recent changes sorted by author.
I think its use would especially be in case a newbie or IP address was doing good work - check 1 or 2, and then go on to the next person. Even checking on the regulars could be done reasonably fast that way.
Further: a list of recent edits by randomly selected anons & newbies could be a sort of alternate watchlist. When I've made my daily check that the articles I know about haven't been crapped on, I click on the alternate list, and see what a few random new editors are doing. Somebody else clicks and gets a different list. If a bunch of people did this, we'd have a much improved spotting of new vandals, misguided flaming newbies, and astoundingly good new contributors. It could feed into some kind of mentoring, as advocated by Ed Poor.
One that I have thought of (with others at nl:): Give edits a 'trust' value. It starts low (say 0) for newbies, higher (say 1) for regulars and even higher (say 1.5) for sysops. When a regular or sysop watches the change, its trust value is heightened, with a cap at some maximal value (say 2).
Then allow people to get a list of badly-trusted changes. This way we can make it easier to have check-ups cover all messages instead of this one not being checked and that one five times.
Andre Engels
--- Andre Engels andrewiki@freemail.nl wrote:
Then allow people to get a list of badly-trusted changes. This way we can make it easier to have check-ups cover all messages instead of this one not being checked and that one five times.
I like the concept. However, I would like to see little checkmarks next to the edits. with the name of the checker on mouseover. Visually, then, the number of checkmarks would help show who has looked at it. Actually, since it would not confer a seal of approval, I would rather see a pair of eyes, pair of glasses of some sort, to simply indicate that a particular edit has been looked at, rather than give the perhaps false sense of having been "validated and accepted".
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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