On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Samuel Klein <meta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Those examples are also widely used all over the world, including in > regions where the Internet is still new. > > Most highly popular services start by letting each participant define > themselves, and the default contribution that people are encouraged to > make is usually permament and not subject to removal by others. > > One of the unkind and awkward aspects of the Wikipedia experience is, > that the default requested contribution is an edit, new page, or > upload, all of which may be reverted or followed by warnings and > challenges, by people who expect you to RTFM to learn how to behave. > > Some possible improvements: > - add new things that all users are encouraged to contribute > (first-class citizens of the list 'ways to further the project'), > which are entirely within the user's control: information about > themselves and their environment, joining wikiprojects and work > groups, taking part in polls and usability studies, answering > questions from other users and readers > - make a user's contributions permanently visible to them, if not to > others (modulo vandalism), taking advantage of permalinks and file > histories, even when those contribs have for now been removed from the > default public view(s) of an article, or when they have been > quarantined from view by other users for concerns about copyright > status. this improves on the crude tool of deletion and keeps > contributors from feeling that their hard work has been destroyed or > disrespected, often due only to it being incomplete or > not-yet-proven-notable. > - develop better sandboxing policies, tools, and effective sandbox > environments, so that new users can truly experiment and get used to > editing before they are challenged, reverted, deleted, and blocked. > > Sam. > Soft deletion. I'm still a fan actually. While we still have way too many deleted revisions both from before and after oversight and revision deletion were introduced that are not fit to be seen, I think it would be worth revisiting a default form of deletion that preserves a public history, and reserving hard deletion and oversight-ish things for things that really need to go away forever. With regard to copyright though, unfortunately, those deletions do need to be "hard". We can't knowingly let Wikipedia be used as a store for copyright violating materials, even if they are stored just for the benefit of one user, otherwise WMF could face legal liability issues.(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just an open source advocate with some personal interest in copyright law.) However, we should at least preserve a personal record of those contributions without the actual content, so that the user can understand why they were removed and learn from it. -Steph _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
