[WikiEN-l] purpose served by anonymity / unmoderated edits

[John Lee]

On 3/20/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 20/03/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hmm. If someone told me that any change I made to Wikipedia would have
> > to be "approved" by someone, or that the change would be somehow
> > "provisional" or "second-rate', I would be less motivated to work on
> > it.
>
> Mmm. Motivation is likely to decrease as the approval process gets
> backlogged, and I'd be impressed at a process which can (to pick
> numbers out of the air) re-approve a couple of hundred thousand
> articles on a weekly, or even monthly, basis.
>
> As an aside, this is a perfect project for an "ongoing fork". Every
> article on StablePedia is a static copy of a past Wikipedia article,
> perhaps slightly tidied by SP editors and reviewers; old revisions
> aren't displayed, and people are pointed back to Wikipedia to work on
> the ongoing draft. When you want to update, you just dump the old one,
> grab a new copy, approve and post on StablePedia - GFDL compliance is
> simple enough, and this means you can display your "approval
> infrastructure" nice and cleanly without conflicting with the live
> project. There's no conceptual reason the Foundation couldn't host
> both, either, and it might even be beneficial to do so as a trial
> balloon.
>
> (The downside is that it's much less high-profile... but the *upside*
> is that it might actually happen. Major changes to the publishing
> structure of enwp proper, especially a credentialled editorial-control
> system, are rather unlikely to ever actually get in place...)


Yes, I was just about to sugges a similar system myself. An ongoing fork is
a much better solution than making the approved version the sole public one.
Speaking from personal experience as a webmaster, simply making users take
one more step to edit an article (i.e. clicking on "view draft article",
instead of being able to go direct to editing) can drastically reduce (I'd
say halve wouldn't be unreasonable) the number of users who take the desired
action.

And speaking from experience as an editor, a lot of my edits are "impulse"
ones made when I see an obviously erroneous statement or wrong formatting or
spelling error, or when I see something obvious I can quickly add to an
article. I'm sure a lot of other edits, especially those by anons, are made
this way. If I had to take one extra step to view the latest version of an
article (which I'm sure would be the only editable one), as I'm sure all
anons would be forced to under the proposed Citizendium-ish idea, my number
of impulse edits would probably be zero.

An ongoing fork solves this problem by making the tradeoff between "latest
bleeding edge but prone to errors" and "quite damn accurate, but not quite
up to date" explicit and clear to all users, and giving them a free choice.
Most who would prefer the bleeding edge version are the type who would edit,
while most who would stick with the tried and true ongoing fork are not as
likely to edit, making it ideal.

Johnleemk