[WikiEN-l] Re: The whole point of wikipedia

[Alphax]

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Stan Shebs wrote about anonymous editing:
> very often at least one of the vandalisms is "complex" in that it 
> involves multiple edits, and maybe a ham-handed incomplete attempt to
> fix, thus requiring careful study of the history to make sure all is
> scrubbed.
> 

The best solution in cases where an anon or a newbie has tried to revert
is to do it yourself, manually. If Mediawiki finds that there is no
change, it silently ignores the revert.

> Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, 
> random rearrangement changing good English into broken English :-), 
> etc. This leaves a handful of valuable edits, but the average total 
> is less than I could have added in the same hour just working from 
> the books in my personal library. Nevertheless, I do the patrolling 
> because it seems that many of the pages I'm watching have no other 
> reviewers - more than a few times I've overlooked an anon's trash and
>  it went unnoticed for days or weeks.
> 

You should be on the welcoming committee! Wherever possible I leave
messages for anons who have "done good" (or at least, not done bad - and
I leave messages for them as well). It lets them know that their work is
appreciated, and more importantly, lets them know how things work around
the place.

> So yes, we're keeping the random vandalism under control, but IMHO 
> just barely, and at the price of time that should be going into 
> development of better content. I think we really need to consider 
> whether unlimited anon editing is helping or hurting our primary goal
>  of encyclopedia writing.
> 

It's entirely possible that we are reaching the point of discovering
that Wikipedia doesn't scale. We already know that certain parts of it
don't. Maybe it's time to "set aside" (permanantly protect) some of our
best articles for version 1.0 and let people work on the rest.

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