Wikipedia talk:German page approval solution

I think the article was right: if the German Wikipedia is doing it, that's great, because then we can see how it works. We should wait. There are other complications as well. What if one anon makes an edit to a page, which does not show up immediately, and then another anon wants to make an edit before the previous one is approved? —Mets501 (talk) 19:46, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Idea is incompatible with the basic principles behind wikipedia, unworkable on a large scale, and encourages abuse and elitism

I strongly oppose this for several reasons: First, it would heavily discourage new (and probably existing) editors from contributing. The biggest appeal of Wikipedia to new users has always been that they can change something NOW. See a typo? Fix it! The word Wiki in Wikipedia literally means quick, after all, this system goes entirely against that principle.

Second, this would have a variety of potential abuses and negative impacts on even long-standing editors: It would encourage violations of WP:OWN, discourage boldness, people could maliciously downrate other editors, etc.

And, now that I think about it, a third reason to oppose this would be the sheer infeasibility. Unless this system were to discourage new edits so severely that 75% of them stopped, it would probably not be possible to keep up with the backlog, which would grow beyond all mortal comprehension until we had hundreds or even thousands of new articles backlogged and waiting for approval.

This is essentially a far more complex, more abusable, less beneficial varient of the proposal to require editors register prior to contributing. If the German Wikipedia is using this system, I'm afraid they no longer qualify as a wiki in any effective sense. --tjstrf 21:07, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that to resolve the situation you mentioned, the system could only be applied to major edits only, or even strictly pages that are protected, while general pages that are in ordinary situations can remain in a normal state. Doomdayx 21:26, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

If it was applied just to major edits, then people simply abuse the minor tag even more than they already do. If it was applied solely to protected pages, then it would simply be an overly complex version of the "propose changes on the talk page" idea, trouble for the coders, and irrelevant in its effects. --tjstrf 21:36, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Let's just first see how it goes on the German wikipedia before discussing that it's unworkable (it might be, it might be not). Garion96 (talk) 23:35, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I think the idealogical concerns alone should be more than enough to stop this from being implemented myself. --tjstrf 00:08, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

As Doomdayx suggested, what about using it just like a lighter version of Semi-protected pages? As semi-protection replaced full-protection for many troubled articles, setting them more free and "wiki", the same could happen again, just to further liberalize semi-protected pages.
And about the incentive (remarked by Mets501) for new anony users to see their chances take immediate effect, this could be kept: letting anonym user that edit pages to see the lastest revision by default; just random readers that don't edit any page should see the "flagged revisions" by default.--BMF81 00:15, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

This idea fails the Siegenthaler test

Would an editor with edit approval powers be able to tell at a glance whether the famous malicious edit to John Siegenthaler Sr.'s biography was proper or not, assuming he had no knowledge of the subject? (Speaking for myself, I certainly wouldn't.) Recall that that was a policy violation; in fact it violated WP:V, a policy that I hold to be absolute, overriding even WP:NPOV and WP:NOR if it ever comes to that. If we are not going to design the system to be able to catch this level of vandalism, then the proposal is just instruction creep.

What I fear this idea (and ideas like it) will do is that it will make make people intent on doing harm to Wikipedia simply go about their malice more cleverly. It will attract the sort of person who likes a challenge. Ask yourself if you want to deal with intelligent vandals. Personally, I like my vandals dumb enough to be detectable by bots. Right now vandalising Wikipedia is so easy—and so easily detected and fixed—that it's ultimately not gratifying. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 04:53, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I would agree with you that this policy is unworkable. [irrelevant discussion about policy subsumption refactored into User talk:Kaustuv/policy tree ] --tjstrf 05:34, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

50 different vandal accounts

And what happens if 50 different vandal accounts are registered, then go thorugh and tag every last edit I've made as bad, and eachothers as good? There's a website called newgrounds, where everyone can rate stuff. Yet what happens is that groups of malicious accounts rate crappy edits as good as possible. Simple things become a war of attrition on voting comments up and down. The 'vandalism' example listed means groups of vandal accounts can prevent me from removing their vandalism. Wouldn't that be nice? There's a term for it along the lines of "vote bombing". Unless this can be solved, this proposal would be a disaster. Kevin_b_er 01:09, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

software?

This idea would require quite a extensive SW support. Is anything like this already present in MediaWiki or being developed?

More info

For some more info on how it works/will work on the German wikipdia see this mail on the foundation mailing list. [1] Garion96 (talk) 23:01, 17 September 2006 (UTC)