The articles for Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockhart, and Aerith Gainsborough are both high-traffic and high-visibility pages. As such, these are articles where their state has huge implications for the rest of the wiki. These are pages that will be judged not only by readers, but by contributors, as a standard of quality against which the rest of the wiki will be judged. This is why the current version (written primarily by me, with proofreading from other contributors) received a very high level of scrutiny before it was published as it was. It is therefore imperative that any future changes to these articles also receive the same level of scrutiny. That is to say, edits are made in a sandbox first, scrutinized by other contributors, before a consensus is found in favor of making those changes. This does not deny contributors from making improvements or suggestions to the existing page, but rather requires that said changes be discussed by the community first. Unfortunately, due to their high visibility and popularity, as well as implications among the shipping community, these pages frequently receive significant, normally low-quality, edits from contributors. Changes which do not measure up to verifiability standards, follow proper formatting, or otherwise induce shipping war bias, are not permissible anywhere on the wiki, but it is especially important that they are not added here. The current status quo means that big changes (i.e. 1k+ byte changes) are almost always rollbacked and never looked at again simply because we do not have the time to explain to every single person why their change has to be reverted to preserve quality standards. To expect us, as volunteer contributors, to go through and scrutinize every single change to these pages, and then write lengthy explanations on editors' talk pages after the fact, is simply not feasible. Therefore, I propose we formalize the current expectation and lock these pages at sysop level, require all editors to use the talk page to discuss major changes made to them first, and adjust the talk page to advertise this fact. Doing so will hopefully lend the way to far more productive discussion and changes surrounding these pages. I strongly welcome scrutiny, suggestions, and discussion about any potential omissions these articles have, but it must go through the talk page first, and not edits to the page. I hope other contributors will find this to be a reasonable request. | |||
As stated, this proposal seems a bit overkill. Since Tifa Lockhart was locked at autoconfirmed level in February, it has received only one edit. If our mods is really incapable of reviewing the tiny amount of edits that make it past the usual safeguards of autoconfirmed + abusefilter, then a better solution sounds like aggressively recruiting more mods. And if that's what the problem here actually is, then that just means that I need to put on my bcrat hat and get to work.
That said, the current status quo is problematic, to say the least. It's a really bad look if we say that we're the "database that anyone can edit" and then if a newly autoconfirmed user makes a change to our front-facing pages it's immediately rollbacked: this sends a message that our slogan is a bit of a lie. So, counterproposal:
- If FFWiki, through a public-facing process such as Rin's Travel Agency or a talk page, identifies a page as both high-traffic and high-quality, then that page will be locked indefinitely, and given an mbox saying "if you want to make a major edit, or are anon and want to make a minor edit, please discuss on the talk page first, other edits are liable to be reverted". This protection should be used sparingly, and should be dropped when new media comes out concerning the article's subject (eg, when the next FFVII Remake part drops).
There's a somewhat orthogonal issue that I think gets conflated with the above issues: the shipping wars. The evidence of the autoconfirmed protection on Tifa Lockhart is quite clear IMO: it almost entirely wipes out the influx of Twitter meatpuppet weirdos. So this counterproposal would also deal with shipping war nonsense. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 15:18, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- The point is big edits to these pages shouldn't merely be reviewed by one mod. They must be reviewed by the community and by the consensus process. The pages are delicate where they are because an addition of a paragraph may be grammatically correct and formatted properly with the right sources, but we would still have reason to reject it if we find it harms the flow of the page or makes it too lengthy. The hardest part of writing these pages was saying as much as possible in as few words as possible.
- That said, aside from the fact I don't think mboxes belong on finished pages (but am fine with it appearing as a sort of in-editor popup), I am happy with the proposal. I'll add when new media releases that an article should have an mbox then and be required to go through the consensus peocess before the mbox is removed.--
Technobliterator TC 20:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)