Sounds rather ominous!
Having read that, it seems clear that Mr. Chi here is approaching this from an almost entirely ergonomic perspective, as opposed to an ethical-humanist or societal-impact perspective. That would be in keeping with his professional focus, of course (PARC has been a leader in computing ergonomics for a long time, as is well known).
That isn't to say he's missing the point, but this bit strikes me as the key question he's interested in:
QUOTE
So now the research question is whether you want to design your editing policy to favor the upper class (top editors and administrators), the middle class (the 5000-6000 editors who contribute the middle 50% of all edits), or the lower class (the 15000 editors who contribute the last 25%).
One way to think about this problem is to study the amount of resistance each of these four classes of editors experience on Wikipedia. A metric that we used is the reverts-to-edits ratio. That is, on average, what percentage of edits were reverted, as experienced by each of these four classes of editors? Turns out that the reverts-to-edits ratio for each of these 4 classes of editors were 1.3%, 1.4%, 1.5%, and 4.7%, respectively. Meaning that the lower class of editors clearly experience greater resistance, such that, on average, 1 out of every 20 edits they contribute are reverted.
For good or ill, hardly anyone on Wikipedia thinks in these terms, and the vast majority of them believe that the same rules should apply to everyone, including admins, even Jimbo himself in many cases. That's not necessarily bad, of course, but the real issue for them is
how do they define the term "everyone."In other words, it's obvious now that a clear majority of WP'ers agree that the higher rates of "disruption" and "tendentious editing behavior" by AnonIP's makes it acceptable to treat them as a different, less-privileged class of editor than the "community" of named users. This should have been obvious to all of them from the start, but old egalitarian dogmas die hard. The really unfortunate thing about this isn't that AnonIP's will be treated differently now; the unfortunate thing is that they waited so long to do it, it's now much harder to implement this because of the fear of what's considered negative publicity - most of which is likely to come from the tech media, which is what many of them read almost exclusively.
Moreover, I would think that quite a few Wikipedia admins and "power users," having looked at those numbers, would
not think, "gosh, there's a significant disparity there." Instead, their reaction would be, "how is it that admins are getting a whopping
1.3 percent of their edits reverted? And who's doing these reverts? And can they be banned summarily"? And so on.
