[Wikipedia-l] [Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article]

[Rowan Collins]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 10:12:16 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> In many CMS's there is the concept of a "trusted user", who has
> privileges to do such things, but is far from being a sysop. It might
> well be worth looking at a similar idea for wikipedia - which would
> allow such "judgment calls" to be made by users who have put the time
> in on wikipedia, but who aren't interested in, and do not need, full
> sysop privileges.
 
Note that there is a fine-grained permissions system currently under
development in MediaWiki. Theoretically, we will soon be able to have
any number of levels of user, or even just grant individual users the
rights "we" [the community] feel they deserve. And it's not beyond the
realms of possibility that relatively minor privileges (like
publishing changes to "semi-protected" pages, perhaps) could be
granted to any user account that's existed for X days, or made Y
edits, or perhaps submitted an automated request via a Special: page
(i.e. you give yourself the rights, implying that you know vaguely
what you're doing). See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:User_levels

As somebody pointed out, having a *universal* edit delay (e.g. for all
edits by logged out users) would just be frustrating (and confusing)
for people who wanted to do passing minor editing. But what Jimbo
seems to be suggesting is a kind of "semi-protect" function which
triggers such a display *for a particular page*, which seems like a
very good idea.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]