Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-28/News and notes

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In the battle of the petitions it is now 198 to 13 in favor. Hurray flagged revisions! Besides the well known BLP issues we now have some highly popular yet controversial articles like evolution and Charles Darwin that are kept essentially permantly protected against anonymous edits because they are swamped by vandalism, OR, and good faith but unconstructive edits every time they are unprotected. With flagged revisions it may be possible to turn off protection and maybe sift through the dross and pick up some valuable edits from anon editors. Also the very fact that flagged revision is in play on certain vandalism prone articles may reduce the incentive to vandalise in the first place. Rusty Cashman (talk) 04:40, 30 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

202 / 14 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.171.2.8 (talk) 05:37, 30 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that flagged revs replace antivandal protection completely. In the high-vandalized pages the job of "sift through the dross" would be plain waste of time of expert wikipedians who will make more good by writing something good themeslves than figuring out some possible sense from some incoherent babble. IMO it is high time to get rid of this irrational fear to "deter" "possible" new contributors. The project is quite mature now. Several years ago Jimbo called for a quest for article quality. The subsequent removal various nonsense, original essays and random context such as "list of songs that mention death" did not hurt the project. Likewise, it is time to demand and expect quality, responsibility and maturity in contributors, rather than in contributions. - Altenmann >t 22:32, 3 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]