User talk:Thue/Wikipedia editing permissions reform

I like the basic idea, but it wouldn't work in practice. The approval queue would be too huge, and dynamic/multi-user IPs would cause major problems. N (t/c) 20:56, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
 * The approval queue would be distributed, one per article. So if we just display a big sign to all trusted users "this article has pending edits, please approve or reject them", there is a good chance that the queue would not grow too much in most cases. I know that I would watch over the articles on my watch list. It is of course hard to say if this would work in practise... Thue | talk 17:35, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

This proposal could be better as a form of article protection. It only needs to be applied to articles that get large amounts of vandalism compared to the amount of good edits. You could also look at User:Kate/WhyWikiPediaWorksNot, the proposal I made was similar, but instead of having a queue, logged in editors automatically see and work from the version with the latest edits. Immediately they edit the article, that auto approves past changes. Adding your proposed warning to that would be helpful since they could then be more aware to check for vandalism. Mozzerati 15:27, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Just some suggestions for the proposal (which I think is an interesting one, though I don't know if I entirely support it) that I think would make it more usable:
 * For each user, maintain their opinion of every other user, as one of: trusted, neutral, or untrusted. Everyone thinks everyone else is neutral to start.  Untrusted users can mark others if they wish, but their marks don't count for anything until they become trusted.
 * Allow users to change their opinion of another user at any time and, in fact, encourage this behavior. If you run across a couple good edits by somebody, you mark them as trusted.  If you later discover a few bad edits, you drop them down to neutral or untrusted.  If you see a vandal, you mark them as untrusted.
 * Change the requirement for gaining trusted status to requiring at least 2 more trusted marks than untrusted marks. This should be dynamic, so if someone is trusted by 3 users and untrusted by 1 and one of those 3 users decides to drop them down to neutral, they'd become untrusted again.  For most solid editors, this shouldn't be a problem, since they should quickly gain quite a few trusted marks and so the loss of one would have no effect.
 * If a user is banned for vandalism, trolling, or such things, anyone who has marked them as trusted is automatically dropped to neutral (and as a result, the user is no longer considered trusted). I wouldn't suggest that this be done for all bans, though (3RR or similar infractions shouldn't have any effect).
 * The above changes would, I think, make the system more maintainable by the editors as a whole rather than needing as much admin supervision. The requirement that a user be trusted in order to make useful marks on others would prevent sockpuppets from flooding the place with untrusted marks.  This would also allow someone who feigned being a useful editor in order to vandalize to be reverted to untrusted, since they would probably achieve a bunch of untrusted marks the minute they went vandalizing.  The total "score" of an editor would give a somewhat useful gauge of how solid an editor they were, as well.

Some other thoughts that aren't really major changes:
 * Have an additional tab between "article" and "discussion" that's "proposed article". Here, any queued unapproved edits would be visible.  If there are no unapproved edits, it wouldn't appear or would appear in red.  If there are unapproved edits, editors would only be able to edit the page from there.
 * Have a new special that shows all the pending untrusted edits, with the longest pending displayed first. That should allow the queues to be processed quickly, though a concern might be that it would probably heavily reduce the number of people watching Recent Changes, allowing vandalism by trusted editors to slip through more easily.
 * Add a new method of protecting a page where a minimum trust level (as measured by how many users have marked you as trusted) is required to edit the page.
 * This would force editors to at least load the pending version of the page before editing, which should cut down on the chance that having two versions of the page causes someone to read the approved page and then edit the unapproved version and screw something up. I'm not sure if that's a concern to anyone else, but to me the idea that you could click "edit" and end up editing the source for something other than what you were just looking at is a potential danger.

- Flooey 07:08, 3 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your comments - I guess I should just implement it. When people can see it in action then they can decide to what degree it should be used. Thue | talk 22:13, 8 November 2005 (UTC)