[WikiEN-l] "Software Weighs Wikipedians' Trustworthiness"

[Bryan Derksen]

Gwern Branwen wrote:
> The most exciting ones I can think of:
> 
> #We can scrap the 'newest 1%' part of semi-protection. Instead of 
> waiting 4 days, write 4 articles!

On the one hand, as an inclusionist and apostate mergist, I would
welcome anything codified that boosted the philosophy that "more
articles is good". On the other hand, though, forcing people to run the
Newpages Patrol gauntlet in order to edit other existing articles may
not be optimal. It can be frustrating seeing one's work randomly
blipping out of existence minutes after saving it, I wouldn't want that
experience explicitly forced on new users. And some editors just don't
_want_ to create new articles; they prefer editing existing ones. That's
perfectly useful too.

> #We can scrap editcountitis - this reputation metric may still not be
>  ideal, but I suspect the metric will reflect the value of one's 
> contributions *a heckuva* lot better than # of edits.

I _wish_ editcountitis counted for more, I'd be a sort of demigod. :)

I'm not sure why a reputation metric of any sort is necessary, though.
The contributions to articles themselves should stand on their own; one
of the main defenses I gave to the press during the Essjay controversy
was that we don't usually consider the reputation or qualifications of
the editors relevant when evaluating their work. And if an editor has a
history of significant disruptiveness, inaccuracy, etc., then it'll be
raised on their user talk page and perhaps ultimately proceed on to RfC
and other such fora. We don't need robots and math formulae to do that.

> #Bots could probably benefit from this. An example: Pywikipedia's 
> followlive.py script follows Newpages looking for dubious articles to
>  display for the user to take action on. You could filter out all 
> pages consisting of avg. reputation > n, or something.

Could work, but there's no need to display the orange highlighting for
this one.

> #People have
> long suggested that edits by anons and new users be buffered for a
> while or approved; this might be a way of doing it.

Also might work, but version flagging is so close to being real now that
I'd like to see how that goes first. Baby steps. :)

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