Arwel Parry (arwel@cartref.demon.co.uk) [050108 02:43]:
I have previously defended the right of anyone to edit Wikipedia, but I'm afraid I'm increasingly coming to the view that anonymous users should be prevented from editing articles, or at least from editing anything linked to the main page. I would like to propose that we institute a policy of imposing immediate 24 hour bans, without prior warning, on any anon user that vandalises an "extremely popular" page as defined by Jimbo, or a page linked to the main page.
I and others have been shooting-to-kill (well, 12 to 24 hours) repeat vandals who hit the Featured Article of the Day. First-time if it's simple vandalism, they're logged in and should damn well know better. Check the edit history of [[Orca]] when it was the article of the day.
I would however advise taking *extreme care* to be sure it's actually vandalism - a lot of it will just be sandboxing, i.e. "I can edit this page? Huh? Let's see ... uh. I can. Um, what do I do now?"
Showing viewers who aren't logged in the 10-minute-delay version and logged-in users the current version would be an obvious step as well. Casual users who've read that [[2004 Indian Ocean earthquake]] is a fantastic article will get the 10-minute-delay version, but logged-in editors will understand what vandalism or sandboxing is and that they should fix it.
I suppose the edit message for anon users should say something like "As an anonymous editor, your edits will take up to 10 minutes to show on the live wiki. If you were just experimenting, click _here_ to revert to the version before your experiment, and try experimenting in the _Sandbox_."
The up-to-10-minute delay would I hope not hurt our Wiki nature too much. Is there anyone who disagrees, or has qualms?
- d.