The ban on logged-in users making changes to their own root nodes (in some sections but not others) mostly just leads to duplicate nodes (and is probably the primary reason for non-anonymous duplicates, IMHO).

This "ban" has been at PM longer than I have been here and I've heard justifications for it of "a node could get approved and then the author could change it to be highly offensive". But the risk of that is less of a concern to me than the current "busy work" of dealing with the many duplicate nodes, especially since the current moderation system is better at dealing with hiding, removal, or modification of offensive material than at dealing with duplicates.

I have plans for greatly improving PM's duplicate node prevention. I also have plans for a mechanism to prevent people from wiping their old nodes1 and this could be applied to approved root nodes in all sections. So, down the road, both problems should become less serious.

But in the mean time, I'd like to allow users to edit their own root nodes in all sections and deal with abuses when they come up (which I hope will be a net win over the current work of dealing with duplicates when they come up).

Discuss. (:

1 By requiring approval and/or keeping backups for changes to nodes that are more than H hours old if more than P% of the original characters of the node are not preserved (and perhaps check for hiding via HTML comments and measure P in terms of the backed-up original from the first "late edit").

(Updated to finish one sentence, expand another.)

                - tye

In reply to End ban on root node edits? by tye

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