Yes and no.
It's a wiki, and this is a common wiki pattern. Often there are social rules restricting what kind of editing you can do. Eg, you can fix typos but not rewrite bios. But the technology doesn't prohibit it.
We could very quickly establish social rules and decide, for example, to suspend users who tamper. If we want to enforce this through technology, we'll have to make coding time.
as a suggestion... We could get people signing up to agree that profile tampering might lead to WikiRate's right to suspend any user account. I can draft something up if you like. Or we could have profile editing an administrator plus user access if that doesn't require coding.
I would think the list of things that could get someone's account suspended would be pretty long. I'm very much in favor of starting to articulate that, but I would expect profile tampering would be one of the lesser problems and not worth special mention at sign up. Ad hominem attacks, willful misrepresentation of your relationship to a company, spammily promoting external websites, etc. We haven't really begun to define acceptable behavior.
Are you thinking profile tampering needs to be given elevated placement because it's potentially more problematic than some of these other things?
My impulse would be to say that, rather than broaching all this explicitly at sign up, we should say something very brief about requiring honest, respectful behavior and include a link to another page that gets into specifics. I know we're not entirely ready to blast out a full array of policies, but I think we can start by conveying that we reserve the right to suspend accounts for disrespectful behavior.
Enforcing respect is, of course, a tricky business. How many micro-aggressions do we overlook? How about the male contributor who is consistently but subtly harsher in his reviews of everything a female contributor adds? In a lot of domains, we move quickly to emulating Wikipedia, but given that their authorship is 90% male, we may want some original thinking here. Who pulls the trigger on suspensions? Can people appeal?
Very soon, the community will rightly want policies that ensure they're not going to get booted off because somebody with privileges disagrees with them. My suspicion is that, like most everything else on wikirate, we will want transparency to be at the core of this, so that we display all suspensions and our rationale. And, generally speaking, we'll want to give warnings wherever possible and only jump straight to suspension when the violations are egregious.
I guess for next steps I would suggest that we start drafting a document about expected behaviors but not link to it very prominently. Once we get it reasonably well defined we can link to it from the sign-up page. It may take some calls to get there.
These issues are, afaik, only theoretical at this point. But they will soon become practical, and perhaps even before then, they make speak to our credibility.
(note: would require some coding for administrator plus user. would eventually like to have that option, but developer time is especially tight right now)
I was also thinking about this today! Specifically about the "list of things that someone could do to get their account suspended", and how we want to handle that process. I'm very much in favour of starting a wider discussion around articulating the principles of what constitutes acceptable behaviour and policies for dealing with unacceptable behaviour - and I think the time is indeed right to start the ball rolling on this.
The point raised by Hala's ticket, which gets into "social" and "technical" permission to edit different content types is worth developing as a closely related piece. We have fairly robust shared ideas about what an individual user should and shouldn't edit - with plans to make some of these rigid technical restrictions. It would be worth setting these out too so that we have something to refer to if we need to revert someone's edits.
Right. Just to echo that, I think it's fair to expect a permissions upgrade before long. But I don't think it's necessary or wise to wait until then to articulate a policy.
How about a pop-up one liner for starters with an accept/reject option stating: Any tampering with other user profiles on WikiRate might result in immediate suspension of your account.
I think the point is that profile tampering is just one of 50 things that could get your account suspended, and it's not among the most damaging or most likely. We don't want 50 pop ups.
Nor do we want users' first experience of the site to be a threat.