[WikiEN-l] How wikipedia could link into File Protection.

[FT2]

The idea of restricting asrticle writing to a small group ("experienced
article writers" "admins" "veterans" "blp specialists endorsed by the
community") has been raised before. In principle if the group is made large
enough to not be owned by some small clique and with a suitable policy
guiding how it works and its responsiveness, it's viable without undermining
NPOV and openness.

The crunch point is "open to editing by all", and a large number of users
take that aspect seriously and literally. Philosophically once "open to all"
is drawn back, the same logic applies to any type of article where a person
or group might be unhappy with editing, and there's also a risk that groups
once created tend to gravitate to their own internally developed norms or to
become slightly separated.

Open editing is a major safeguard against Wikipedia being able to be
monopolized by some special interest group, or affected by censorship of
some minority or externally imposed stance. Add a means to limit article
control to some group, and there's always a risk it can be used in future in
other ways.....

Not agreeing or disagreeing, more just outlining the perceived pros cons and
issues.

FT2





On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Jay Litwyn <brewhaha at freenet.edmonton.ab.ca
> wrote:

> Subject-Was: Re: A new solution for the BLP dilemma
>
> "Nothing new is under the sun", are among the most humbling of a preacher's
> words. If you hav ever right-clicked on a file that you uploaded to your
> website (and you probably hav one that you are not using), then clicked on
> "properties", you would be greeted with this menu of flags, all within your
> control:
>          R  W  P
>          e  r  e
>          a  i  r
>          d  t  m
>             e  i
>                t
> Owner:    X  X  O
> Group:    O  O  O
> Everyone: X  O  O
>
> Those would be appropriate settings for your user page, which is the only
> one that the system would let you own. Admins would be owners of all pages
> in main: and user: on wikipedia. That way, if you you refused to comply with
> one rule or another concerning how user space is used, then an admin would
> permit everyone to also be able to write to your space, so that a volunteer
> could show you his ignorance of those rules :-) I can almost see the author
> of "vandalproof" hanging his head and asking why he did not think of that.
>
> group permission is a special feature of protected file systems. Windows
> does not hav group permission in XP, TMK, and it does let you protect shared
> objects from being written to. My web server is NetBSD, so it does hav
> groups. Users can be added to groups, so that people who hav made
> applications for being included in a group -- applications to a sysop would
> let you write files in a particular project, because you were a member of
> the required group.
>
> In a series of occurances, here is how a biography might become authorized
> and get a special stamp of approval from the subject of the biography.
> Someone write's a biography about someone else on their user page.
> They let it out among their collaborators.
> Two of those collaborators want to fix it, so the starter permits everyone
> to write to it.
> An edit war breaks out, so the sysop (sysops always hav power to permit, as
> well as power to destroy, which is not displayed) retracts all permission,
> except permission to a group, then assigns three veterans to that group and
> solicits their attention to an article in progress.
> No blocks are issued.
> No significant flaws are in the wording or the evidence.
> The page is permitted for reading by all and writing by none.
> Occasionally, on the talk page, someone raises {{editprotected}}.
> The questions typically get an answer that could hav been found by reading
> three months of history.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>