[Wikipedia-l] A proposal for the new software

[Jimmy Wales]

Mark Christensen wrote:
> I don't think that the above is exactly how we should do it, but I wanted to
> through out some specifics because the "devil is in the details."  The idea
> may be fine, but the implementation could easily bring up real problems...

Right.  It's really an empirical matter.  We want most people to be
able to get full privileges pretty quickly by just sticking around.

One nice thing about a points system is that if we find ourselves
under constant attack, we can just raise the limits.

> As far as who assigns Cabal status, I think it absolutely has to be
> automatically assigned (of course the administrators can manually edit the
> assignments if they feel the need).  If there are persistent vandals, other
> Cabal members can temporarily ban their IP, and/or administrators can
> manually bump down their KP.

Right, I think that's the best way to do it.

The most important thing is that any hierarchical structure must be
based on nothing other than *real participation*, and that it should
be as loose as we can possibly manage.

I have something in mind here like the "strict scrutiny" test that the
Supreme Court uses in judging potential restrictions on speech.  The
restrictions on newbies must be for a compelling community interest
(to prevent vandalism) and must be specifically and narrowly tailored
to achieve that goal.

> As far as how to get the thing started, we could automatically generate some
> KP numbers for users by mining existing history data (Say you get a KP for
> every 5 or 10 page edits you've logged), or we could follow Jimmy Wales's
> suggestion that we implement the KP log for long enough for some people to
> gain privileges before marking any pages as requiring privileges to edit,
> either way should work.

I think it would be fun to see our karma points add up, too, even if
they mean nothing.  That would allow us to tweak the scoring for
awhile, too.

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