Dear Ancestry Insider,
"You’ll be able to reject the change with one click of a mouse." - So what's to prevent edit warring?
In case you don’t already know what an edit war is, Wikipedia describes it thusly:
An edit war or revert war is a situation that sometimes arises on websites which are run on wiki principles, such as Wikipedia, where users repeatedly re-edit or undo or reverse the prior user's edits in an attempt to make their own preferred version of a page visible. With the ability for anyone to edit a page, and older versions of pages stored in the edit history, edit warring becomes possible as long as there is little or no control over the editing.
Ron Tanner, new FamilySearch Tree (NFS) product manager, has said that he wants NFS to have a dispute resolution process like Wikipedia. Edit wars occur constantly on Wikipedia, but the community has evolved rules for handling them.
I think the Wikipedia community has evolved since the last time I looked into their dispute resolution practices. Administrators can still protect pages from changes. But the old system, arbitration, no longer makes decisions about whose information is correct. The community has developed procedures to help disagreeing parties reach mutual agreement before resorting to arbitration. Parties are urged to use the discussion feature. Informal and formal mediation can help combatants reach mutual agreement.
Only when a user become uncivil is the old arbitration process invoked. According to the arbitration policy, the arbitration committee can apply sanctions including:
- User X is cautioned against making personal attacks even under severe provocation.
- User X is limited to one revert per twenty four hour period on article A.
- User X is prohibited from editing group Y of articles for a period of Z.
- User X is banned from editing Wikipedia for a period of Y.
- If User X edits group Y of articles, they may be banned for a short period of time of up to one week.
Stay tuned to see if Tanner gets what he wants, or if FamilySearch is able to create a community that can rule itself.
The Ancestry Insider