Well, there's nearly a thousand admins on the English Wikipedia. If someone is unable to convince A SINGLE ONE out of ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE that he should be unblocked... then I'd say that might be a reasonable clue that he needs to learn better how to play with others.
(And there's a fair bit of agreement between admins, but there's also a tremendous amount of disagreement, so if you ask two admins something you'll get four answers. So if someone is dead set determined they've been hounded out by admin group think... then they're probably not going to do too well at Wikipedia anyway. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right.)
In practice, most of our anon edits are perfectly good edits - and people don't really want to go through the hassle of creating yet another web page login just to correct a typo.
However, also in practice, anons don't get no respect, so people should make a login if they want to contribute something substantial.
As we at Wikipedia are painfully aware, there are vandalbots designed specifically to attack Mediawiki installations, create sleeper accounts to wreak havoc a month later, etc., etc. It's amazing just how creative complete dicks can be sometimes.
It will actually help the recent-changes patrollers a lot. See the actual proposal - it'll give the recent-changes patrollers a handy list of newbie edits to deal with first. It's not watertight, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to help.
Speaking as someone who's worked his arse off for Wikipedia for the last three years... I heartily endorse this comment. Wikipedia is not perfect and doesn't pretend to be. It's pretty good, but there's no substitute for thinking and checking the listed sources yourself. What, no listed sources? Then take it with a bigger grain of salt. Etc.
We already have a lot of editors who aren't great writers or researchers, but feel they can contribute to the project by watching for vandalism. And so they do. So we do in fact have the people, and this will help them by giving them a list of all edits from not-logged-in and newly-registered editors only.
I do press for Wikimedia in the UK, and had pretty much exactly this happen - I was interviewed on Irish radio by George Hook, who wondered why his article was semi-protected. I unlocked it live on air on his request, so we could see what happened;-) If you check the article history, it's held up surprisingly well - some vandalism, some low-quality random crap, but it's lasting pretty well. I left a note on the talk page to leave it unprotected so Mr Hook could see just what happened to his own article.
The main reason for this sort of attention is that, in the wake of the Siegenthaler kerfuffle, the English Wikipedia now has a really hard-arsed living biographies policy - the basic rules (neutral point of view, verifiability, no original research) apply, but they're very strongly enforced. It seems to be working and keeping us out of trouble so far.
I'm serious - the Mediawiki software really needs contributors. PHP is easy, PHP with MySQL is harder, programming a database while not crippling service on a top-20 website is harder still. But Wikipedia needs developers. If you have a clue about Wikipedia and the ability to write code fit to run a top-20 website, Mediawiki wants you.
The actual proposal (not the Bill Thompson version) does in fact answer your concerns. Including the George W. Bush article being opened for general editing again, rather than being in semi-permanent semi-lockdown.
When vandalism doesn't immediately put MR JOHNSON IS GAY LOLOLOLOL in the George W. Bush article - when vandalism has greatly reduced public visibility - the incentive to vandalise is greatly reduced.
We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.
We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20 website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August 2006 -- http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the readers.
The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a 'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The idea is to enhance the reading experience, and free us to enhance the editing experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.
Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and vandalism -- this will assist their work and we do not expect new delays.
We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other language Wikipedias.
These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the front page itself to full unrestricted editing.
When was this proposed?
Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late 2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a very high-quality article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_ea rthquake) very quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost the start of the project, in 2001.
If Windows was free software, we could take it back to the original Dave Cutler conception of NT and really build a good VMS-With-GUI. There's a deep core of non-suck in Windows, but you'll never see it now.
"1) Someone starts selling MP3s without DRM for less than 99 cents. (By the way the first legitimate store (read not Russian based) to do this would take almost half of iTunes business overnight. Of course the meglomaniacally stupid bastards in the RIAA would never ever decide to make billions of dollars selling money that way, no sir!"
eMusic does legit MP3s for about US30c. Though not RIAA.
If you fork Wikipedia (remember, the database is open content and the software is open source), it's certain that with rallying cries of this standard, the community will follow you.
Slashdot Mirror
(And there's a fair bit of agreement between admins, but there's also a tremendous amount of disagreement, so if you ask two admins something you'll get four answers. So if someone is dead set determined they've been hounded out by admin group think ... then they're probably not going to do too well at Wikipedia anyway. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right.)
I found this hard to believe until you got to the AFD bit.
However, also in practice, anons don't get no respect, so people should make a login if they want to contribute something substantial.
As we at Wikipedia are painfully aware, there are vandalbots designed specifically to attack Mediawiki installations, create sleeper accounts to wreak havoc a month later, etc., etc. It's amazing just how creative complete dicks can be sometimes.
Everyone can see a not-logged-in IP, but if you use a login then only a very few people can see what IP you are using.
It will actually help the recent-changes patrollers a lot. See the actual proposal - it'll give the recent-changes patrollers a handy list of newbie edits to deal with first. It's not watertight, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to help.
Speaking as someone who's worked his arse off for Wikipedia for the last three years ... I heartily endorse this comment. Wikipedia is not perfect and doesn't pretend to be. It's pretty good, but there's no substitute for thinking and checking the listed sources yourself. What, no listed sources? Then take it with a bigger grain of salt. Etc.
We already have a lot of editors who aren't great writers or researchers, but feel they can contribute to the project by watching for vandalism. And so they do. So we do in fact have the people, and this will help them by giving them a list of all edits from not-logged-in and newly-registered editors only.
The main reason for this sort of attention is that, in the wake of the Siegenthaler kerfuffle, the English Wikipedia now has a really hard-arsed living biographies policy - the basic rules (neutral point of view, verifiability, no original research) apply, but they're very strongly enforced. It seems to be working and keeping us out of trouble so far.
I'm serious - the Mediawiki software really needs contributors. PHP is easy, PHP with MySQL is harder, programming a database while not crippling service on a top-20 website is harder still. But Wikipedia needs developers. If you have a clue about Wikipedia and the ability to write code fit to run a top-20 website, Mediawiki wants you.
http://www.mediawiki.org/
Thankfully, it mostly does in practice, because most people don't in fact seem to be malicious.
Bill Thompson got it completely wrong, even given the correction. The internal FAQ on the matter gives a better picture.
In more detail: the internal FAQ.
The actual proposal answers this question.
The actual proposal (not the Bill Thompson version) does in fact answer your concerns. Including the George W. Bush article being opened for general editing again, rather than being in semi-permanent semi-lockdown.
When vandalism doesn't immediately put MR JOHNSON IS GAY LOLOLOLOL in the George W. Bush article - when vandalism has greatly reduced public visibility - the incentive to vandalise is greatly reduced.
No, Bill Thompson is being Bill Thompson. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2006_proposed_appro val_for_anonymous_edits is from the horse's mouth.
From Wikimedia Meta-Wiki:
What is changing?
We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.
We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20 website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August 2006 -- http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the readers.
The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a 'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The idea is to enhance the reading experience, and free us to enhance the editing experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.
Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and vandalism -- this will assist their work and we do not expect new delays.
We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other language Wikipedias.
These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the front page itself to full unrestricted editing.
When was this proposed?
Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late 2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a very high-quality article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_ea rthquake) very quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost the start of the project, in 2001.
If Windows was free software, we could take it back to the original Dave Cutler conception of NT and really build a good VMS-With-GUI. There's a deep core of non-suck in Windows, but you'll never see it now.
eMusic does legit MP3s for about US30c. Though not RIAA.
If you fork Wikipedia (remember, the database is open content and the software is open source), it's certain that with rallying cries of this standard, the community will follow you.
Uh, yeah. Apparently my name appeared on the 'site slashdotted' message too. I have nothing to do with this site; I'm presuming the usual trolls.
Getting the community to follow you to your new site: hard.
UnNews. Please.
Please, please post this to UnNews.