How long before some Wiki reader sees a change and responds to it?
After showing
WikiWikiWeb to a colleague friend of mine,
he exclaimed, "They can't possibly just let
Anyone
edit their pages!"
To prove me wrong, he put a new line of text into
MoreAboutMechanics:
this is a test
Of course, he was surprised when the system allowed his
change. We went on to discuss how this could possibly
work and the trust issues involved. I suggested that he
would probably waste a fair amount of time reloading the page to see
if anyone had noticed until it was fixed by someone.
He did, but only for about 5 minutes. Then his change was gone,
which dumbfounded both of us. Now we had another debate: Was the
change fixed by a reader or a cron script?
My hypothesis is that a reader fixed it, and therefore this
topic, which seeks to answer the question: ''How long before some
Wiki reader sees a change and responds to it?''
--
GregPeddle 18:00EST 3/29/00
About 5 minutes.
I'll look at
RecentChanges quite frequently at times. I've turned some edits around within a minute (judging by
QuickChanges) of their being made. If someone is hanging out and hitting
RecentChanges or
QuickChanges a lot chances are that a destructive edit won't last for very long at all.
Thanks for the story Greg. Here at Wiki, we like to FixBrokenWindows, so allowing everyone to edit is actually what keeps most of our windows fixed, rather than broken.
Of course there are questions that hang around and might never get a response.
But most open acts of vandalism get repaired within an hour. I just cleaned the
FrontPage which was misused as a
WikiWikiSandbox 39 minutes ago.
CategoryWiki