User:BigK HeX/Sandbox2

= ga 3rr 1 = 1st revert at 14:06, 29 January 2008

2nd revert at 18:51, 29 January 2008

3rd revert at 19:55, 29 January 2008

4th revert at 02:39, 30 January 2008

= dis = 02:33, 30 January 2008
 * diff .. ga reverts, claiming "summation is a good restatement of Miller's point, which is that the causality is wrong." Even if true, it wold be an irrelevant point, since no one is arguing any sort of causality.

03:49, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * This constitutes a misrepresentation of the Miller source. Please remove it.

05:06, 30 January 2008 (UTC) 05:28, 30 January 2008 (UTC) 06:00, 30 January 2008
 * ga responses given ... still no explanation of the misrepresentation provided, though
 * comment made is "if Miller goes, Daly goes"

15:17, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * "point out precisely where Miller refers to interest costs." (The "cost of money" as you refer to it.)

18:04, 30 January 2008
 * ga reverts

= dis 2 =

=`can =

= Proposed Semi-Automated Solution = In case this movement gains the desired notice, here's an outline that could be proposed.

I see two problems being pointed out here. 1) Established material is easily degraded, and 2) Experts can easily be overwhelmed.

I do not like Zenwhat's idea of graylists, except as an informal feature that might be promoted. However, a solution that utilizes as much automation as possible would be best. One method that could work fairly well for Wikipedia would be to use better article "versioning." Wikipedia's freely collaborative nature is a boon, but as noted in this page, it also allows for degeneration of content. In order to help prevent article degeneration, page sections should become much more prominent units than articles themselves. Content-oriented edits (as opposed to minor typo/grammar corrections) of existing page sections should NOT be immediately posted in all cases. Editors who are truly interested in the Wikipedia content do not need "instant gratification" IMO. Therefore, it may help to give Wikipedia article sections some measure of "protection" based on some measure of the "acceptance" of the page-section's content. "Acceptance" would be somewhat tricky to quantify, but it would certainly be related to section age, number of recent modifications, total number of pageviews, number of logged-in user pageviews, and time of last modification to that page-section. For example, a page section that is visited regularly by logged-in users that received 2 edits in the past 60 days would be given a much higher "acceptance" level than a brand new article section that has received 10 'distinct' edits in the past hour.

With an "acceptance" metric available, article sections could be automatically protected in various ways; this leads to the question of how such protection should be implemented. One could imagine that content edits are "blocked" in some way. A truly collaborative method would then require a majority of votes in order for a new version to be approved, but most volunteer projects cannot be trusted to accomplish this successfully. So, this may be an option, but cannot be the only option. This points to a need for "assumption of acceptability." Such a requirement could be accomplished by simply using the "acceptance level" to determine a proportional time-delay that slows the propagation of content edits.

With such a "time-delay" system, edits to "Higly accepted" page sections could potentially be delayed for days, while edits to sections with a current "low acceptance" may not even be delayed at all. A good way to take advantage of this delay-time would be to allow opponents of the proposed content a one-time ability to further delay the propagation of content changes from an editor on that section. This extra time would ideally be used to resolve content disputes, instead of the current system whereby (in many cases) edit-warring is implicitly relied upon. During this resolution time, the editor of the delayed material would be able to alter his proposed changes .. if acceptable to the opposition, then the extended delay could be released. The ability to release a time-delay could be used as further leverage in gaining consensus with the editor whose content is, in some ways, being "held for ransom."

Generally, this should constitute a minimal impact to the editing process, in most common circumstances. However, this system could create a practical problem in the case of moderately "low acceptance" section edits. If a "dispute delay" is imposed on such a section, then it would lead to an extended edit-conflict situation. In allowing the time for dispute resolution, a section would effectively be locked from further edits; for any reasonable allotment of time for dispute resolution [2 hours, minimum ... though probably closer to 24 hours] this would consitute an intolerable lock time. Likely no clean solution would exist for this problem, but there are 2 saving graces: 1) page sections with *very* low acceptance would not even have this delay anyways, 2) the lock would only apply to a single section of a page, leaving the remainder of the page free. There are some options to mitigate this problem that I could detail, if needed.

One other use of the "acceptance" metric is that article sections could be tagged or even filtered by a user-preferred level of acceptance.

None of this specifically addresses the utilization of our Wikipedia subject experts, but for that I would suggest this simple change ... just allow editors the ability to have watch lists of article sections instead of just entire articles. Due to a new focus on article sections, this would allow experts to focus their efforts on particularly contentious material, or retain peace of mind that agreeable material still exists in the article (even if quality has degraded in other parts of the article). It would also be trivial to place some special designator on the watchlist when a proposed edit has been "dispute delayed," which could draw in more opinions and consensus to a discussion before the edit is even finalized.

Anyways, this is a rough outline. I run my own online community, but I'm still fairly new here, so take this with a grain of salt.

tl;dr ... let's acknowledge that some content deserves some special consideration in regard to preservation, and also make publicly-viewable edits a slower process when affecting long-standing subject material so that talk page discussion can pursued proactively. BigK HeX (talk) 06:20, 2 February 2008 (UTC)