Proposal talk:Authoring groups

Authoring Groups

The issue is, should Wikimedia allow closed authoring groups as a quality control measure.

My feeling is that they should, the reason that I present, is simple, professional quality can only be economically maintained where write access is restricted, This is especially true where the contributors may be academics, that take on a controversial role, such as defending science against religious attack.

On the other hand, by limiting the group members to those that are "Accepted" we run the risk of creating Opinion Cartels that do not yet exist otherwise. I think the issue with this approach, is the implementation.--Graeme E. Smith 03:05, 28 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

The proposal aims at Wikibooks and Wikiversity where authoring groups are natural. A book isn't written by random people who drop in and leave one piece of information on its pages. Wikibooks is supported by groups of people who contribute to the books. The anonymous editor who contributes value to the project should be the exception. (I make that claim without having seen statistics but it seems to be the sensible expectation.) If you aim at Wikipedia with your comment then what you want may be better covered by

Perhaps, but the difference between this and a locked featured article, is the idea that you might want a workgroup working on the project. Locking a featured article only works when the featured article is completed, and sometimes in the case of controversial statements the article gathers some damage before it can be completed. Suppose that you have a scientific team that has completed an experiment with a novel result. You might want them to be able to collaborate on the locked article without interference from those who have done a different approach to the topic. Of course this might not work on Wikipedia with its no-original-content policy, but would definitely be better situated on Wikiversity since Wikibooks also has a no original content policy.Think of it as locking the article before it is completed.--Graeme E. Smith 00:21, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

It seems to me that you confuse the technical side with the organizational issues. To decide to allow authoring groups for Wikibooks and to give them the technical means to limit access does not require to make assumptions about the organization of the groups. Imagine the groups would decide on their own policies and administrators would be allowed to revoke and/or override those policies where they were found to be in violation of superior Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wikiversity policies. I don't want to imply that this is a good solution (for Wikibooks it might be good enough), merely that this isn't the place to decide on the exact policies. If you are primarily interested in Wikipedia-related issues then you might want to discuss that (for instance) on the talk page of Proposal:Editorial teams (Redaktionen). --Fasten 15:37, 24 November 2009 (UTC)Reply