[WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough
> encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing
> protection.
[snip]

I couldn't disagree more strongly.  If we were making a judgement on
the basis of count of good edits to vandalism edits we would conclude
that the best solution would be to protect everything— with the
paradoxical effect of Wikipedia not existing at all.

The reality is that the goodness of a good edit is so good relative to
the baddness of a bad edit, mostly because of the tools and resources
that we have to deal with bad edits, that we can pretty much disregard
the vandalism side of that particular equation entirely.
Undo/rollback are easy buttons, and we have many contributors who do
nothing but remove obviously bad stuff (and some who, honestly, aren't
qualified to do much else!).   Without this truth Wikipedia simply
couldn't work.


The notion that the basic workload of dealing with simple vandalism
(as opposed, say, the timeliness of the corrections or the quality of
the articles in the interim) is a significant problem is unsupported
by any objective measurement which I've seen, I'd love to see pointers
suggesting otherwise. I've always believed that we use protection as a
short term measure to preserve the quality of the articles displayed
to readers (who are indifferent to our internal process) and the
protection policy on Enwp is quite explicit that the purpose of
protection is not pre-emptive ([[WP:NO-PREEMPT]]).

I think it's characteristic of an 'administrative bias' to assume that
protection is intended to be a workload reducer, if you're constantly
dealing with the problem cases you're going to overestimate their
magnitude.

This concern also neglects the reduction in the incentive to vandalize
that pending revisions ought to create.  Whatever portion of the
incentive to make trouble is related to the high visibility of the
trouble should be reduced.

Of course, we now have many troublemakers who don't care about
visibility at all— they make trouble purely to irritate Wikipedians.
But these WillyOnWheels class trouble makers are perfectly happy to
make their trouble on less prominent pages which have never enjoyed
persistent protection, since even obscure pages are fine for the
purpose of irritating Wikipedians.