On 10/9/07, Luca de Alfaro luca@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
Users may do most of the editing in terms of number of edits, but original information (even is misformatted) comes, right now, predominantly from anonymous users.
I'd love to see a solid citation for that. I'm not disputing it but I've seen the claim a lot and I'd love to be able to talk about that matter in a more nuanced way than "less"/"more". For example, how does the ratio differ for niche articles compared to more "core subjects"?
I believe that they will be disincentivated to edit, if their edits won't be reflected immediately, and I think the process that has made the Wikipedia so rich risks an abrupt slowing.
I agree that this might be a possible outcome.
Why are people opposed to changing the software so that after an anon edits he sees the most recent version of the article for the rest of his browsing session?
I expect that for the vast majority of users that behavior would have almost all the beneficial effects of the current instant-gratification behavior, but without the negative impact to quality.
So long as the flag pushing tends to be faster than browser sessions are long this would behave the same for the users as if their version were approved right away.
I would hope that version flag pushing should be roughly as fast as vandalism reversion, i.e. much faster than browsing session lifetimes. But I only expect this to be true if the flagged version is the default view, thus creating some urgency for flag pushing.
If flag pushing were somewhat too slow we could use longer lived cookies, but there are performance implications (and workarounds) to consider there.