On 09/10/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Which brings us back to Fleshlight. It was the subject of a subtle edit war between the company that manufactures it, and a similar company which wanted to have an external link on the Fleshlight page.
I think that this is one of the big advantages of German-style ideas like [[Wikipedia:Timed article change stabilisation mechanism]].
It makes it much more expensive to link farm (since they have to make ~50 good edits before changes appear, which costs *time* and hence (for a company) *money*). They *need* the edits to quickly appear; because they often get reverted quite quickly, adding a time delay puts a spanner in the works for them.
Fundamentally, these kinds of ideas primarily add *visibility* about the editors identities; it gives incentives not to be anonymous, not to vandalise, and not to link farm, but as soon as editors register accounts, then the wikipedia has a way of tracking and gaining visibility of the editors character; without in any way necessarily giving away their true identity. And these schemes do it without preventing anonymous editors from making useful contributions.
Danny