I think Anatoly's proposals have merit.
We certainly don't want to allow the changes to impact our culture in a negative way. Cautiousness is warranted, because wikipedia works well as it is. We're just looking to the future and anticipating how to scale as we get more popular.
I'd just like to point out that I dislike "point" systems because they explicity avoid simple human subjective judgment. They're just bad AI. The problem we're trying to solve is inherently one of subjective value: most people's edits are valuable to us, but some aren't. I don't want to abdicate responsibility for that judgment to a stupid automaton.
If we want to give "reliable" users privileges that we don't immediately give to everyone, that's great. But just give them-- don't build a whole system of automating it, just give them to those who ask, and who have earned them. I would far rather that flag be set by a real human being exercising judgment than by some meaningless process.
lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
If we want to give "reliable" users privileges that we don't immediately give to everyone, that's great. But just give them-- don't build a whole system of automating it, just give them to those who ask, and who have earned them. I would far rather that flag be set by a real human being exercising judgment than by some meaningless process.
I understand what you are saying, but
1. one of the goals here is to create a system which avoids even the appearance of favoritism or bias. The process of "earning" the privileges should leave little or no discretion to the owners of the project...
2. The "privileges" under consideration are really quite small. For the most part, the concept is to protect the most highly trafficked pages from sheer malicious vandalism. So to "earn" the privilege should be quite easy -- you basically just have to be around for a few days and not be malicious. Even people who we don't like should be allowed to edit pretty much anything, as long as they aren't being malicious and are willing to ultimately go along with community consensus.
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The only reason to even bring this up is that there have recently been some initial incidents of true vandalism. Someone put a pornographic cartoon on the homepage of the site one night. Another person has been going through writing "fart" on various pages. I don't think anyone (even The Cunctator, who has been reluctant to endorse any form of protection out of fear of a cabal) regards these acts as merely legitimate differences of opinion.
It is possible -- but unlikely, I think -- that someday we will have a big huge argument between two or more legitimate participants, an argument which degenerates into massive delete wars or edit wars. We've seen something similar between a couple of otherwise legitimate people lately, although it ended (badly) within the space of an hour.
SOMEDAY, we may have to find a way to deal with a problem like that.
But for now, we're just interested in tightening things up *just the tiniest amount* on *just the most likely pages for vandalism*.
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