Contributor
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2018
- Messages
- 3,656
Summary:
The Contributor role was established to solve edit-trolling, but I feel like the cure has been in many ways worse than the ailment was. Community editing restrictions that still allow crowdsourcing are pretty much a solved problem: Require an account, and require some account age and/or activity before you can make edits.
One must still ban the occasional idiot every now and then, but really, it's been sufficiently demonstrated that it doesn't take that high of a hurdle to discourage trolling. (It's not like securing against a security threat.)
History of the problem:
Mostly it's the accuracy of tags that has suffered noticeably.
The effect was pretty much immediate, after the contributor role was established. Maybe some of you didn't notice. Perhaps a lot of you wouldn't have thought it a big deal if you had. But I have to say it's much more noticeable when you're running into, say, stuff that wasn't tagged as yaoi right after the change, but just as shounen-ai—having unexpected dicks shoved in my face was a novel experience in its own way but not something I signed up for.
To be clear, back then there was more mass-power-uploading going on, so I assume a lot of stuff was getting pretty minimal eyes on it. The tag accuracy got better as mass-uploading died down, which is correlation rather than causation, but seems to make sense. But it's never gotten back to pre-restricted-editing levels of accuracy, and certainly tags on Mangadex now are way less accurate than tags back on Batoto (which had open editing) were.
And I feel like it's been getting slowly worse again for a while now.
To give an idea, I usually only edit tags when there's something pretty clearly missing or wrong. The number of edits I made to tags on Batoto was something on the order of three or four edits per year. And I think I could still count on my fingers, the number of edits I'd made on Mangadex when the contributor status came into effect. (Maybe there are records; any admin is free to reference them in support or opposition to what I'm saying, I admit I'm curious just how accurate my memory is).
Fast forward to now, and I feel like I'm making a couple edits a week on average. And I'm not even looking at new series! I'm about a month behind in updates (I look at all updates but fall behind and catch up over time; I'm currently hovering at stuff published 30 days ago because work has been all-consuming lately). This stuff should really be fixed and ship-shape already.
In short, I feel like the whole contributor thing really hasn't lived up to its promise.
Proposed solution:
As stated above, I've been a bit bemused from the beginning, because I thought crowdsourced edit-permissions was a more-or-less solved problem. That is—just keep raising the bar for how much you have to participate before you can edit (e.g. make an account, have that account be around for X days/weeks/months, make n posts, etc...) until the troll population gives up and moves on. Occasionally you'll have to ban someone for vandalism, but it gets rid of the need for manual control of the pool of users that can edit, and the crowdsourcing of information can proceed smoothly.
Let me know if I'm missing something here.
The Contributor role was established to solve edit-trolling, but I feel like the cure has been in many ways worse than the ailment was. Community editing restrictions that still allow crowdsourcing are pretty much a solved problem: Require an account, and require some account age and/or activity before you can make edits.
One must still ban the occasional idiot every now and then, but really, it's been sufficiently demonstrated that it doesn't take that high of a hurdle to discourage trolling. (It's not like securing against a security threat.)
History of the problem:
Mostly it's the accuracy of tags that has suffered noticeably.
The effect was pretty much immediate, after the contributor role was established. Maybe some of you didn't notice. Perhaps a lot of you wouldn't have thought it a big deal if you had. But I have to say it's much more noticeable when you're running into, say, stuff that wasn't tagged as yaoi right after the change, but just as shounen-ai—having unexpected dicks shoved in my face was a novel experience in its own way but not something I signed up for.
To be clear, back then there was more mass-power-uploading going on, so I assume a lot of stuff was getting pretty minimal eyes on it. The tag accuracy got better as mass-uploading died down, which is correlation rather than causation, but seems to make sense. But it's never gotten back to pre-restricted-editing levels of accuracy, and certainly tags on Mangadex now are way less accurate than tags back on Batoto (which had open editing) were.
And I feel like it's been getting slowly worse again for a while now.
To give an idea, I usually only edit tags when there's something pretty clearly missing or wrong. The number of edits I made to tags on Batoto was something on the order of three or four edits per year. And I think I could still count on my fingers, the number of edits I'd made on Mangadex when the contributor status came into effect. (Maybe there are records; any admin is free to reference them in support or opposition to what I'm saying, I admit I'm curious just how accurate my memory is).
Fast forward to now, and I feel like I'm making a couple edits a week on average. And I'm not even looking at new series! I'm about a month behind in updates (I look at all updates but fall behind and catch up over time; I'm currently hovering at stuff published 30 days ago because work has been all-consuming lately). This stuff should really be fixed and ship-shape already.
In short, I feel like the whole contributor thing really hasn't lived up to its promise.
Proposed solution:
As stated above, I've been a bit bemused from the beginning, because I thought crowdsourced edit-permissions was a more-or-less solved problem. That is—just keep raising the bar for how much you have to participate before you can edit (e.g. make an account, have that account be around for X days/weeks/months, make n posts, etc...) until the troll population gives up and moves on. Occasionally you'll have to ban someone for vandalism, but it gets rid of the need for manual control of the pool of users that can edit, and the crowdsourcing of information can proceed smoothly.
Let me know if I'm missing something here.
