Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20150611114308

So here's an item that has been driving me a little crazy the last little while: editing privileges for new users. It seems that most of our time as admins is spent cleaning up after a mess a (usually new) users have made.

For the most part, this involves users updating information that we have expressly stated is not to be added, making subjective changes to stats like power grids and alignments, and a number of other administrative headaches.

I think what makes this a particularly stressful and time consuming job is the fact that these new users will get confrontational about us rolling back or advising them of how to make proper edits to the site. This usually translates to them whining about not being able to do whatever they want, or starting edit wars.

It's constant, and I am wondering if there is something a little more proactive we can do about the issue.

Looking around at other Wikis I have noted that they have certain functions to limit what a new user can update and it is used as a means of creating a peer review system so they can correct any issues that might be generated by a new user who really hasn't bothered reading any announcements, or the FAQ pages on how to contribute.

Marvel.com's official Wiki page has a means of peer review. All edits have to be reviewed and approved by an administrator before they are published and they can choose to veto updates for any reasons. I think that if we can implement this function, we should do this. That way, we can peer review a new users updates and determine if they have anything they need to adhere to better. Adding reference tags, doing the proper research, etc. etc. If we can roll this out for all new users moving forward (and perhaps applying this retroactively to those who signed up in the last year) I think we can steer people to making valued contributions to the site and root out trouble makers, adding spoiler worthy material without putting in the proper spoiler tags, and other irritating users who are just going to cause us more grief than they are worth. We could adopt a policy that if someone makes x amount of contributions without issue they go off review and can update things without peer review.

If we can implement the above, perhaps we can code a system so that edits from new users are distributed evenly among admins to review. Maybe some kind of alert comes up on our dash boards or something. That way we're constantly alerted of new edits that need peer review and can action them right away.

Another thing I've seen -- and I think I saw this somewhere in the Admin dashboard but I don't have the level of authorization to implement -- is setting it that new users cannot initially edit major pages. So a user can only edit less popular pages for a certain period of time so that we can review their work before they attempt to work on a more popular character or page. Not sure what the parameters are for that but that is an alternative to the above that I think we already have integrated into the system.

Thoughts? 