Wiki Response Time

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