Unless I'm badly misunderstanding <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_an...</a> the article is misleading (and the title given here, which is not the same as the one currently appearing at the top of the NYT article, even worse).<p>1. The NYT title has "some articles" where the title here has "articles". The title here gives the impression that WP is about to start imposing extra restrictions everywhere, which it certainly isn't. The pages targeted by this measure are biographies of living people.<p>2. The page I linked to above, unless I'm all confused, says that what's actually going to be done is to allow BLP pages to be protected from vandalism using the flagged-revisions mechanism instead of the (already existing, already frequently used) protection/semi-protection mechanism. So even BLP pages won't be affected by default, but only when an admin specifically takes action.
You know what Wikipedia needs? Game mechanics. Give every registered user x number of commits/edits/reversions. Jack up x based on participation and commits/edits/reversions that "stick". This way, new people can still add stuff (because editors can't infinitely revert) but can't just make a bunch of spam accounts to flood the site.<p>Obviously, you still do the IP address/superuser stuff as additional checks, but this increases the penalty for adding useless stuff or deleting useful stuff just because you didn't do it.
"The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and predictable."<p>This seems like flawed logic to me.
The backstory to this is that it's just as likely that flagged revisions will <i>open the encyclopedia up</i>. Wikipedia already has a mechanism to keep people from editing controversial pages: "protection". A protected page can't be edited by anyone but an admin. "Flagged" pages are more open than the protected/semi-protected pages.
Maybe I'm alone here but the part of the article about the NYT working with wikipedia for the past 7 months to censor information about their kidnapped journalist is more troubling to me than the article/Wikipedia change itself.<p>I understand their reasoning - and that thankfully it worked since the reporter is now safe - but doesn't it seem really odd for a leading newspaper to admit to working to censor news?<p>Not to sound completely paranoid or cliche but... Where does the NYT / Wikipedia draw the line on something like this? Is WP working with any organizations to censor information?
From what I can see, the idea makes sense. They already have levels of protection that can be applied to pages when they feel it's necessary, and this seems to be an extension of that. The only big difference is that it still allows contributions from untrusted users if someone is willing to verify it.<p>That said, it seems like there is some sentiment that this ought to be something that is put in place over a widespread portion of the site. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I have a hard time believing that there are enough volunteers for that without stagnating the site. As I said before, this seems like an extension of the protection system, and it ought to be applied in a similar manner.
I dislike the fact that they chose the term "flagged", which, in a lot of other contexts, implies "flagged for review". On wikipedia, instead, an article revision is flagged because it's been reviewed.<p>This annoys me about as much as the fact that Ctrl + Mouse Scroll Wheel works backwards in Firefox versus every other browser out there (Ctrl + Scroll Up actually makes the text smaller, which is completely unintuitive. Up means taller, bigger, stronger! Who screwed that up?)<p>Also, they drive on the wrong side of the road in Britain! The first two problems are worth fixing... I guess the third one can't be helped.
The "flagged revisions" UI was utterly horrendous the last time I used it, way beyond the knowledge of the average user. I hope they've tidied it up since then.
This headline is confusing, to me anyway. In my mind, Wikipedia already has a layer of "editing", but what they mean is a layer of <i>editorial</i>, which to my mind is very different.