Wikipedia to remove editing restrictions

The media has been telling us that Wikipedia is going to add more editing restrictions to prevent vandalism, and becoming less and less open. Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, the founder of Wikipedia explains that the media, as so often is the case with new digital world, has the whole story backwards:

The new feature will allow the community, using the same sorts of procedures and norms that we have used for years to determine semi-protection and protection status, to flag certain versions of articles as "non-vandalized", and these versions are what will be shown to users who are not logged in. The feature will be tested in the normal manner of all new features at Wikipedia, with a simple quiet introduction and a period of testing and evaluation within the community.

We expect the following benefits from this innovation:

  • Wikipedia will be more wiki than ever, in the sense that for the first time in years, we expect that nearly ALL pages will be open to editing by ANYONE, even non-logged-in users. This means the almost complete elimination of the editing restrictions we have been forced to have for years.

It certainly sounds interesting. If that works, maybe we should implement a similar thing for JSPWiki?

(BTW, in case you are tracking JSPWiki progress, the CVS just landed the ~WikiWizard WIKIWYG editor. Expect a new, final beta, RSN.)




Comments

I've heard about a similar idea by Chris Purcell, if I remember correctly. He called it Stable Copy and used it on his PeriPeri engine: Basically new visitors only get to see revisions that have not been touched in two weeks. If a lot of activitiy around a page starts, visitors keep seeing the "stable copy" until editors have pulled back for at least two weeks. This makes the system automatic.

Congrats on wysiwig! :)

--AlexSchroeder, 01-Sep-2006


Hey Alex,

Just wanted to point out that it's Wikiwyg, not Wysiwyg. :) I, however, prefer to call it WYSIWiki. :)

Chuck

--Chuck Smith, 01-Sep-2006


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"Main_blogentry_010906_1" last changed on 01-Sep-2006 08:22:31 EEST by JanneJalkanen.