Lane, Ryan wrote:
I personally don't understand the reasoning to
want to edit other people's
posts. Can you give an example of a good reason to edit someone's post?
Truthfully, I think its more of a detriment than a benefit to be able to
edit someone's posts. I can think of a ton of bad reasons to edit another
persons post, but very very few good reasons.
It's the wiki way. Having the ability to edit what other people write
gives rise to a culture of co-operation rather than confrontation.
We don't have a strong culture of refactoring, but it is traditional
in a wiki to refactor discussions, which means, for someone to come
through and take a large discussion and neutrally summarize what it
was all about. Everything is in the edit history, and of course
people can refactor the refactoring.
Basically, having a system open where people *can* do something bad,
but don't, gives rise to a spirit of helpful togetherness. Building
barriers out of fear of bad behavior gives rise to a spirit of
mistrust.
It would be MUCH better to have a system where the
user making the
post allowed/disallowed people to edit their posts. If I'm signing
my posts, I don't want someone to edit it to change my opinion to
side with theirs. For instance, if this email were a part of a
thread in a forum, you could change it to make it look like I side
with your argument, and most people wouldn't notice.
We don't really have any problems with people doing stuff like that.
It would be a massive social faux pas to edit someone's post to change
your opinion. Just because it is *possible* doesn't mean that it's a
*problem*.
It's like saying we need a law to prevent people from going into
elevators together, because if we don't, people might stab each other.
Well, yeah, they might, but we're better of in a positive social
environment than a too-cautious social environment.
This is similar to a discussion we had about protecting user pages,
and there was very universal agreement that with only rare exceptions
(heroic vandal fighters like RickK for example, whose user page would
be a constant mess, and even there of course I would encourage him to
try to keep it unprotected if he can) user pages should be unprotected.
--Jimbo