Up to 2,000 articles, including a page about former US President George W Bush, will have their strict editing restrictions relaxed.
Users will now be able to submit changes to the selected pages for review by senior editors.
It is part of Wikipedia's ongoing efforts to curb vandalism of the site. [It's a two month trial.]
Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales told BBC News that the new system, called "pending changes" will allow the site "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years.
"That's what is exciting about this," he said.
It's sure going to be interesting to see if this system works without important pages being vandalized.
2) Look for a, "little magnifying glass where a lock once was. The icon, on the upper right corner of the article, represents an important step that Wikipedia volunteers have taken to open up articles that were previously protected from editing."
3) English Language site only
4) "At present, only about 0.1 percent of the 3.3 million articles on the English Wikipedia are under edit protection. This tool should help reduce disruptive edits or errors to articles while maintaining open, collaborative editing from anyone who wants to contribute."
What would be interesting to know is what percentage of page views the 0.1% actually turns out to be. Are these some of Wikipedia's most popular pages especially when the topic of the page is "hot."
5)
When Pending Changes is applied to an article, the article will be open for editing by anyone, including anonymous and new users. When edits are made by new or anonymous users, changes will be reviewed before they appear on the main version of the article. Anyone can view these proposed edits by clicking on the “Pending Changes” tab alongside the “Edit” and the “History” tabs. In addition, by scrolling over the magnifying glass icon, you can quickly see exactly how many changes are pending review.
Another thing to watch for will be how long it takes for a change or changes to be approved or denied.
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