A. Considerations from past experience[edit]
In general, anonymous and new editors only make minor changes and corrections to articles and do not require close scrutiny. Vandalism is usually one-off, obvious and easily corrected; take action quickly by banning accounts/IP address to limit the affected pages. In the 17 years this project has been online significant vandalism has only happened twice (multiple accounts and IP addresses over a sustained period of time). If you encounter that type of vandalism make sure to plug the hole they are exploiting in addition to banning the accounts/IP addresses. For example, add edit protection to content or template pages being targeted. If you have server access you can temporarily restrict some site functions on the server they are accessing.
A more challenging problem is quality consistency among the sites contributors. If we had a larger pool of regular editors there could be collaboration and discussions per article, but right now each contributor works individually on their own using their own preferred styles, which results in inconsistency among content pages. Ideally all articles on the site would be written with a common voice, using generally the same style and meeting similar qualities, but that does not currently happen. I don't want to speak to the reasons why, but my suggestion would be:
- 1) Stop anyone who beings regularly adding uncited or unreferenced content, even if you know that content to be accurate. a) other users will not have the same ability to evaluate the accuracy of that information (Bahaipedia:Gateway not a destination) and b) down the road they may add content of questionable validity which could negatively impact others or the site.
- 2) Monitor and possibly stop users who only contribute for the purposes of self-promotion. It's unlikely these users will expand the scope of their work and attempt to benefit the project as a whole, so efforts made to assist, monitor or guide will not yield any fruit.
- 3) Spontaneous contributions from individuals previously unconnected to the project account for a majority of the original content that exists on this site, so I think an avenue for such individuals to join and contribute should always been open, but with that in mind it may be useful to explore the idea of establishing a network of knowledgeable individuals who can work together to make content suggestions, solicit articles to be written and who may be able to monitor/correct/expand articles covering certain important topics. In other words, a combination of anonymous and solicited contributions, or structured vs. unstructured.
B. Monitoring contributions[edit]
Special:RecentChanges should be actively monitored. Certain apps—any supporting Atom/RSS feed reading—like Flym for Android can monitor and notify you when a change is made to the wiki. The Atom URL to provide to the application for such monitoring is [1]. Other lists, such as one's watchlist, or user contributions, have their own Atom/RSS feeds (available under the Tools menu at the bottom left of the page), but only the Recent Changes feed will notify for all changes to the site. At least one person should be responsible for monitoring RecentChanges who can respond to questions posted, vandalism, etc.
