QUOTE(gomi @ Tue 23rd June 2009, 3:11pm)
QUOTE(Nerd @ Tue 23rd June 2009, 2:44pm)
Destroying hundreds of people's lives simply because you disagree with them doesn't sound like the most wonderful of ideas.
Are you joking? This would be
returning their lives. Like discovering a risk-free antidote to heroin addiction.
The solution here is embedded in the question: the problem is not the (flawed, rife with error) database of Wikipedia, but the community itself. How do you destroy a (volunteer) community? Make it deeply unpopular, or provide a compelling alternative. One of the reasons WP won't implement flagged revisions is that it would create a strong disincentive to drive-by editing, the source of much of the "community". I'd start there.
Good, because you're already past the bounds of what is known or even reasonable. How do we
know the requirements of simple user account registration (have a paid email account which you probably have anyway, and put in the gigantic mental effort to select a username and password) are such a horrible disincentive to drive-by editing? Particularly when they get you out of having to do the stupid CAPTCHA anytime you add a weblink, which you're often doing anyway if you're doing any editing of any value (which will include some weblinks surely in your cites). The time you lose creating a username is paid back almost immediately in CAPTCHAs not seen.
Same for the extra stuff you get like ability to send email to others and upload images. And if you want to edit protected Wikis (a larger and larger fraction) you have to register and wait out the confirmation time. Okay, so you have to wait 4 days-- again big deal. In 4 days, you're going to be the same place you are now, except 4 days older and without the ability to edit sprotected stuff if you didn't make the necessary application 4 days ago. This is not NOT a good argument. It's been made by the WMF for years and there's NOTHING logical behind it. If you ask them, their evidence consists of some francophone fr.wikis where the IP vandalism doesn't remotely resemble en.wiki's, which find that most of the good editing (for a very small group of editors with very few edits) is done by IPs. In France and Belgium. So what? Most of the IP-vandalism done here, isn't done by ANYBODY over there, because they aren't big vandals even when they ARE IP-users. What does that tell you?
(IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/blink.gif) Nothing! It tells you that, for over here, you don't know. Which, as Socrates reminds us, is sometimes a good place to start.