[WikiEN-l] Re: the wik user

[phil hunt]

On Fri, 14 May 2004 19:47:58 -0700, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>I think you've hit on the crux of the matter: if wik were merely an 
>edit-warrior who got into fights everywhere, he would've been banned 
>long ago. 

This is no doubt true.

> It's true some of his edit count is due to edit wars, but 
>some of it is also due to simply being a very prolific editor with 
>apparently a lot of time to devote to Wikipedia, much of it on 
>relatively uncontroversial topics.  Sometimes he also turns out to be 
>right in his disputes, and his opponents use tactics no better than his, 
>which further complicates things.
>
>I think in general Wik's behavior isn't a major problem in terms of 
>actual behavior,

I disagree. When Wik's behaviour drives off respected members of the
Wikipedia community such as [User:Tannin], it is a problem for us
all.

Wik has made some useful edits. Unfortunately he also has a very 
abrasive manner. This means that his behaviour often annoys other 
Wikipedians, who are sometimes as a consequence discouraged from 
further contributing to Wikipedia as a consequence.

It seems to me that the amount of good edits Wik has made may well
be less than the number of good edits other people have been
discouraged from making as a consequence of Wik's actions. If this 
is the case, then Wik's overall effect is a negative one.

>The structural change is something that occasionally gets proposed but 
>hasn't been detailed to anyone's satisfaction yet.  The main issue is 
>how we can make things less "fragile" without also losing the 
>characteristic "anyone can edit any page" nature of Wikipedia.  

I'm not sure that's possible.

>Personally, I wouldn't be against losing some of that for 
>more-established pages---once an article has been hashed out over a 
>period of a year or two by hundreds of people, the ability for anyone to 
>change anything seems to do more harm than good.

That may well be the case. Consider how the front page has been 
protected, to stop vandals.

> In fact, most major 
>edits to something like, say, [[Israel]] will be reverted anyway unless 
>there is plenty of talk-page discussion about each point first, so maybe 
>it wouldn't hurt to make this restriction more technically-based.

Where there are contentious pages -- of which [[Israel]] is one -- 
then perhaps the software could explicitly mark them as contentious 
and deal with them differently from normal pages.

For example, how about a rule that contentious pages can only be 
edited by logged-in users whose accounts have been active for at 
least one month?

-- 
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than 
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)