On 10/9/07, Luca de Alfaro <luca(a)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.