On 7/1/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Royalguard11 wrote:
There was a thread about this in the list back in January, but nothing happened because of it. So I started an on-wiki proposal about this
(which
was adding a certain edit count to the autoconfirmed threshold) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_Proposal . I hope
that
everyone goes there and at least gives an opinion (and maybe this email
will
actually make it to the list this time).
This poorly worded proposal strikes me as just more muddled instruction creep that serves no useful purpose.
Ec
That strikes me as being a bit hasty. Aside from biting someone who earnestly put forward their idea in good faith, you're worried about a "poorly worded" proposal? On a wiki? Where anybody can edit -- and, more importantly, fix -- the wording? The wording is largely irrelevant. I'd be more concerned about the merit (or lack thereof) of the concept itself.
So, to the point: anybody could tell you that sleeper accounts are problematic. Semi-protection doesn't do much good, when somebody registered fifty accounts in the past week, and they're all autoconfirmed. The only recourses available are massive reversion sprees and full protection, which locks nearly the entire community out of editing the page until... the sockmaster gets bored?
Recognizing this problem, and hopefully without putting words in anybody's mouth, Royalguard11 has proposed adding one extra caveat to the process of being autoconfirmed: a very small minimum edit count. Small enough that it's no problem to get it for one account, but large enough that it'd be prohibitively difficult to get a large number of sleeper accounts autoconfirmed.
I don't know if it's a great idea, but it hardly seems to hurt anything by being discussed.
-Luna