User talk:Itayb/Randopedia

Response to each of these rules

 * 1) Every user has to register.
 * No change from now.
 * 1) Every user gets a personal userpage, which he/she can freely edit.
 * Again, no change.
 * 1) No one can edit a user's userpage but the user.
 * Minor technical change there, but this is largely expected of people anyway, so no real change.
 * 1) All users get full access to all articles' talk pages.
 * Yep, no change.
 * 1) A user cannot in general edit any other page.
 * Yay, super POV abuse!
 * 1) A user can indicate on his/her userpage that he/she is available.
 * Although it doesn't matter now that there's not much they can do.
 * 1) The system offers each available user a random article.
 * "But... I don't CARE about Britney Spears!"
 * 1) A user can reject an offer. In this case, he/she is offered another, random page. A user can consecutively reject only so many offers before he/she gets blocked (i.e. doesn' get any offers) for some fixed period of time.
 * I can't edit now, because I rejected Britney Spears, Sex, Hominid, and quesgshtrgvgrkt.
 * 1) If a user accepts an offer, he is granted permission to edit this page, and only this page.
 * Yay, no more revert warring, now you can just lock in what you want!
 * 1) While editing a page, the system marks the user as unavailable, and he/she cannot change this status until he/she is done with the article.
 * ...which makes the indicator useless.
 * 1) A user is granted the permission to edit any page for a fixed amount of time, after which his/her permissions to edit this page expires.
 * "I'm sorry that your article time came while you were sleeping! Too bad for you, though."
 * 1) It is quite possible that several editors be granted simultaneous access to the same page.
 * Although not likely, with 500,000 active editors and 1.7 million articles.
 * 1) Content disputes among editors of the same page are resolved by a democratic simple majority vote.
 * Thus implying that nobody else gets any say.
 * 1) Editors can obtain and lose ranks. A new editor begins with a single rank.
 * OBOY pointless hierarchy!
 * 1) More ranks means more privileges. For instance, an available editor who has many ranks is offered several articles in a single offer, which he/she can then edit simultaneously. He/she gets to edit them for a longer duration of time. His/her vote counts more. He/She gets to create new articles.
 * Because those are all great incentives!
 * 1) A qualified user can create a new empty article with a new title. They get to explain what the article ought to be about, why it is notable, and to suggest a table of contents and bibliography. These comments end up in the article's talk page. The creator of an article gets no access to the actual article.
 * Yep, the best way to encourage people to edit is to deny them priveleges to contribute things they know about!
 * 1) An editor loses ranks by committing acts of vandalism, by violating policy and by having articles they had created voted for deletion by the community.
 * I accuse you of vandalism! Too bad you can't protest now because your rank is too low!
 * 1) When an editor loses all his/her ranks, they get automatically blocked by the system for a fixed duration of time. When the block expires, they start over with a single rank. The duration of time of a block gets exponentially longer with each block.
 * Yes, taking away human discretion is good.
 * 1) Rules matter! There is no such rule as "Ignore all rules". Rules must be strictly obeyed at all times.
 * "What, this article is libelous? No, you don't get to remove it, because we must follow the RULES! You must wait until it is assigned to someone who will listen to you."
 * 1) An editor gains a rank by getting his/her current article promoted.
 * ...which many people have zero interest in doing.
 * 1) An editorial team can suggest the current version of an article for promotion. If an article gets promoted, all its current editors receive another rank. If the suggestion is rejected, a rank is removed from each of the current editors.
 * So, wait. Not only do these people LOSE a rank when their article is not promoted, but someone ELSE gets to make the decision to nominate it?
 * 1) When an article is suggested for promotion, a large, random group of editors is sent an invitation to vote for this article's promotion. Each article has a current grade and the criteria for promotion from one grade to the next higher grade are set in policy.
 * Um... you can't set article quality in policy. It's not that clear-cut.
 * 1) The identity of editors is by default concealed. When an editor gets access to an article he/she is assigned a random, human-recognizable nickname which is unique in the history of that article. Whenever he/she signs his/her messages with the four-tilda-sig in the associated talk-page, and whenever he/she edits the main page this nickname is what gets printed/recorded in the history listing, respectively.
 * So, to top all this off, you get NO ACCOUNTABILITY. Yaaaay.

In conclusion... this is not a good idea. -Amarkov moo! 16:17, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

This is entirely unlike Wikipedia
I'm not entirely sure exactly what you're proposing here, but it doesn't seem to be a wiki. Feel free to set up your own website operating under these rules; however, I suspect it won't get very much attention or very many edits. As far as I can see, it's a proposal to force everyone to use editprotected on every article they want to edit and then wait for someone to be assigned the article at random so that they can make the edit; there are several problems here (the most obvious being that reverting vandalism would be very difficult for previous users and virtually impossible for users who had never registered before, there's no process to report vandalism except mentioning it on the Talk page and hoping someone is assigned the article, and yet vandalism is still just as easy to commit as long as you don't mind which article you're vandalising). It would also slow down the rate at which Wikipedia could respond to new developments by a factor of over 10,000 (this is a conservative estimate based on the length of time it takes to save an edit (less than 10 seconds) and the length of time it'll take for an article to be assigned (likely to be at least a day given the editor/article ratio, more given that most usernames are inactive and/or vandals and their sockpuppets). There are numerous other problems too: I've just mentioned two of the most obvious. --ais523 09:08, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Ais523, for your comments. This proposal should not be considered a finished product. It is more of an alpha version. An idea which needs to be developed and modified a lot before it becomes operational. Your comments are very insightful and i will think about them. I agree with you that it's takes a very different attitude towards cooperative editing than Wikipedia does, and i agree with you that in some respects it is much less efficient than Wikipedia. Hopefully this drawback will be compensated by other aspects. For instance, vandalism is not eliminated, but it is much more contained: a newbie can edit only a single article at a time (possibly a single section at a time) and, as you've remarked, he/she cannot choose the topic to edit. For another thing, the more rewards a user has, the greater is his/her freedom of editing and the closer should his editing experience be to editing Wikipedia. Itayb 22:34, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Vandalism may be more contained, but what happens when a vandal gets assigned some high-profile article? -Amarkov moo! 23:45, 26 April 2007 (UTC)