And having a thousand Wikipedias flourish is a nice dream, but what you will end up with is a thousand dead sites with little or no updates. No thank you, I’d rather agitate to prevent bad decisions now that pack up my marbles and go play alone.

Say the powers that be freeze (or substantially chill) wikipedia; then count on exactly what I’ve said, with a yeastlike explosion. We’ll get “The Yale LUG Wikipedia” and “The Fulsom Prison Inmate’s Wikipedia” and the originators will get the kind of centralizing they like and the splintering forces will do their thing. Which, from an evolution of data and social projects standpoint, is kindof cool. This move to chill makes a strong argument that the criteria for explosive growth are not the same as the criteria for maintenance (and you agree with the chillers that there’s a valuable resource here to be maintained, the disagreement lies more in defining the boundaries of that resource.) But this time the move to switch to maintenance criteria can be predicted to actually accelerate growth by fission, don’t you think?

Opening up your own is easy, getting anything worthwhile is, as you know, much more difficult. I don’t have time or inclination even to try.

Sorry, have only scanned this, as it seems you were swamped by true believers pretty quick and the matter got framed accordingly. Here’s a fresh question: So fucking what? The second wikipedia gets to be too much like britannica some enterprising lass will take all that creative commons or public domain content and repurpose it. Hell, I’m tempted to do it myself. Hell, I’m even more tempted to see what we’d get if we as a matter of course opened up a brand new blank slate to recreate the sum of knowledge every N years/months.

There’s some really interesting social dynamics stuff going on here. Wikipedia has come to be a more valuable and credible resource than some of us ever imagined. Makes perfect sense that there would be a little ossification. The difference that makes the difference, I think, is that it’s all free. Don’t like what they’re doing? Open up your own. Which brings us right back to the core issues of authority and authentication and freedom and value. Damned exciting, ’cause in the end if wikipedia freezes up too much you can count on something to fill the void.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gesichtete_Versionen

Hopefully, you can at least guess what “30 Tage und 30 Edits” means and thus see that you are off the mark on that being some fictitious figure. Those are the criteria which will be used in the first tests. Yes, other figures and methods have been debated on the English Wikipedia but that’s just people talking. There are always all kinds of different ideas and cherry-picking the worst of these, rather than the actual implementation plans cited by Jimbo, the Foundation, the developers of the feature, and the initial test rollout of it on the German Wikipedia IS mis-information and fear mongering. You are painting a false picture of what is going to happen by taking scattered ideas of individual users and constructing a scenario you describe as obviously destructive… yet somehow ignore that everyone else can ALSO see how obviously destructive such a plan would be. That isn’t the plan. That’s… well a stupid thing to do. Why are you assuming that the plan is to do the stupid thing? Rather than the thing that the people driving it (Jimbo, Foundation, developers, initial test on the German Wikipedia) are saying?

The same kinds of pronouncements of doom accompanied the introduction of ’semi protection’. Exactly the same arguments about it ‘creating a new class of users’ and ‘putting up barriers’. Some people suggested all kinds of restrictive standards for that too. What did they eventually settle on? Accounts had to be five days old. No massive loss of users. No ‘elitism’ since nearly everyone you might be talking with already had the access or would get it in short order. No ‘barriers to editing’… indeed, replacement of protection on many pages with semi-protection that most users could bypass.

Flagged revisions has always been envisioned and developed in the same vein. The plan (as Jimbo said above) is that it will have minimal impact… pages will be unprotected so everyone can edit them and the minority of contributions by relatively unknown users who don’t have the access yet will be delayed from viewing by unlogged users for the brief time (currently a few minutes on average) it takes to strip out obvious vandalism. That’s it. Nothing else changes. If the implementation doesn’t meet those goals then it will get tweaked until it does.

I never understand the myopia of conspiracies in overlooking that ‘everyone else’ can see the obvious too. Yes, making it hard for people to get their changes quickly displayed on Wikipedia would be bad. Everyone knows that. It’s obvious. So what possible reason could there be for assuming that to be ‘the plan’? Especially when they are telling you it isn’t? They’re lying? They WANT to do the stupid thing which will destroy their site? What kind of sense does any of this make?

You’ve taken random comments and ideas from various people out of context and put them together to form a bad plan which you then criticize… but it was never the plan to begin with. Seriously, go read the German page if you can. If not then at least try to have a little faith that people aren’t lying about not being morons. :]

1) An unregistered user who chooses to edit a page will, unless the page has been sighted, receive a different page (the actual, most current, whether sighted or not page). This is a problem.

2) An unregistered users revisions are NOT immediately available to other unregistered users. That is a problem.

3) Creating a new class of administrators is potentially a problem.

4) There is NO guarantee that it will be 30 days and 30 edits– it might be 10 days and 5 edits, it might be 120 days and 120 edits– that has not been decided. You can charitably assume it will all work out– some of us have been around a while and seen what can happen with good intentions.

Every barrier that is put between legitimate users and their immediate contributions is a potential problem. It has, to use a popular term, a chilling effect on the process of participation. It doesn’t matter how reasonable the barrier might be.

There are two central problems here and you can justify the wikipedia decision until you are blue and it doesn’t change things. First is the mechanics of editing and the effect it might have.

Second, and even more troubling, is the central conceit driving all this: a desire to achieve a kind of legitimacy that doesn’t really make a lot of sense of Wikipedia. A central and important positive characteristic of Wikipedia is that it is NOT Encyclopedia Britannica. It is a living, breathing resource. A successful wikipedia is a different proposition from a gatekeeper-controlled publication, and trying to make it appear to be the latter but operate as the former is an untenable and schizophrenic position. Not to mention pointless… we already have plenty of reference resources that can’t change in real-time.

The very minor positive effect of stopping some spam at the expense of delaying good contributions looks like a fool’s bargain in service of a fool’s errand. As I’ve said before I could be wrong. I hope I am.

The repetition of guesses presented as settled facts and the inability to see a bigger picture of a new, emerging kind of information resource that doesn’t need to be framed like existing traditional sources of information is tiring.

Your claim that the proposal suggests automatic granting of surveyor rights is false. The exact opposite is in fact demanded. Your claim that the proposal says surveyor rights will be granted with 30days/30edits is false. All of these simple facts can be verified at the proposal itself.

You and MrZ, despite both being administrators on wikipedia (1, 2), have done nothing but make things up and obfuscate the truth regarding flagged revisions. It is getting tiresome; this is the last time I will respond to your comments here or on my own blog.

As to the ’social conversation’. Right now, most edits are reviewed for obvious vandalism, copyright violations, and the like within minutes of being made. The same will continue to be true after flagged revisions are rolled out. The vandalism will be cleaned up just as quickly as it is now. The difference is that during that brief delay it won’t be seen by the general public. No, positive contributions won’t be seen during that delay period either, but that’s hardly a dis-incentive. The user MAKING the edit WILL still see it immediately upon hitting save. To them it will appear exactly as today. If they leave the page and then go back before the update has been flagged (again, this kind of review happens in minutes currently) then their change may seem to be ‘lost’, but that should be uncommon.

There is no ‘limit on conversation’. No ‘bureaucratic moderation’. Every edit which is not obviously detrimental will still appear for all users within a matter of minutes. ALL edits will be displayed immediately to the person making them and the logged in users who make the majority of updates. Only the unlogged users who do most of the READING of Wikipedia won’t get them for a few minutes (or never if they are vandalism).

I would add to Mr. Z that even if public edits *are* a minority (I don’t think they are a minority of quality content edits, but neither do I want to get into a debate about what quality content edits are; I am referring essentially to edits that are original and significant rather than matters of style, punctuation, grammar, or admin), I doubt they are an insignificant one… and the proportion doesn’t really matter because a major part of what Wikipedia (and the wiki) is about is the immediacy of being able to effect change. It’s like enabling moderation on a blog or forum, etc… even if approval is quick and consistent, it seriously discourages participation. The action, as well-intended as it might be limits conversation *and* limits the point of entry where most people who become dedicated Wikipedians start.

For some reason, some people think that the editing in the Wikipedia is not a social conversation. But it *is* and that process is at the heart of what makes Wikipedia interesting and resilient in the face of criticism.

Wikipedia is not a typical wiki, granted, but neither is it exempt from riding on the Cluetrain.