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

[Ray Saintonge]

Andrew Gray 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.
>
It's a bit like an "Articles for cleanup" feature.  Things are put into 
the bin faster than they are taken out.  For some it makes deletionism 
an attractive option.  When a process becomes backlogged it is evidently 
not scaling well.

>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.
>
I have no problem with others creating forks into more specialized 
Pedias either.  I'm sure we would also be happy to share our vandals 
with them. :-) For us we would still need to maintain a fluidity between 
the projects.  I would leave it to the techies to comment on which would 
work better on that level.

>(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...)
>
Agreed.  It's one of those ideas that only succeeds in uncovering new 
problems.

Ec