Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20150611114308/@comment-10473115-20150707124633

This discussion is becoming so cluttered with different ideas that I will open a new thread for Recent changes patrol where I'll explain it to more detail why I think it would help with the problems of new user edits. That way we can concentrate to other ideas more closely in this thread.

Idea to name areas of expertise to admins is a good one. Generally good and updated profile pages are beneficial to the community. (And I admit to being a very bad example.) We could also change redundant Active text in Marvel Database:Administrators to something like General admin tasks so everyone could update it to his areas of expertise or interest.

Naming admins to review changes to a specific page is okay for coordinating the efforts if it also involves checking the sources, etc. but it should be based on voluntarily claimed pages and enforcing policies is still everyone's task.

And now to most important proposal, changing of our Protection policy. I don't feel it has to be radically changed but would accept semi-protection to the most popular pages. It could be better because those pages are usually so intimidatingly long and complex that those are not good places to start learning the wiki editing. However, I strongly oppose the full protection to any page which is meant to be edited, only exception being temporary protection from vandalism or edit war. The word temporary should be added to our protection policy. I quote Wikia's help page: "The majority of pages on a wikia should remain unprotected to encourage all users to participate.", which I agree completely. I know that I never wouldn't contributed to the Marvel wiki for the reason that the edits have to be sent to some kind of censorship committee. That makes you feel like it's better to leave editing to someone with more knowledge. On the contrast, after being here a while as just a regular reader of articles, I felt obliged to help even without any prior knowledge of wiki editing. I noticed how marvelous job others have done before but with few errors here and there, and felt that even small contribution to correct those would be appreciated. I think that in hindsight, watching lack of updates to Marvel wiki, we can all see which policy has been more successful.

If we want an active community, errors have to be accepted and those could always be corrected afterwards. That's impossible task for a handful of admins to do so we have to actively encourage every editor to do so. I don't think that the need of updating policy pages forces us to protect the pages, since I don't believe that the new editors read all of those anyway. And protecting expanded histories because there haven't been many editors isn't valid, it's just assures that there won't be in the future either. I don't even see a copy/paste -edit from the main page as a problem. If it's noted in the edit summary and that part is truncated in the main page, it sounds like a very good edit. On the side note, it could be a worth of thought to split longer expanded histories to different pages which could be also linked from the relevant point in the main page.