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SelectiveEnforcement
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesOne of the effects of having police cameras monitoring the streets instead of beat officers or emergency response is that police can now select what events they respond to. Some cases (in London / Newcastle??) have shown that police won't respond to a streetfight if they don't feel like it, simply because they can already see what's happening. Prior to the cameras, the police would have to be physically on the scene of the crime before responding.
Selective enforcement is not a new phenomenon, of course. Police have always had the power to turn a blind eye to events they aren't interested in. Vancouver police are infamous for ignoring the lowest east side of their city, even after more than fifty prostitutes went missing--later discovered serial murdered. The point here is that there has been an erosion of the public's privacy without a guaranteed equal increase in their security. (Wouldn't you rather have the cops show up in person?)
PeerReview mechanisms also allow this kind of selective enforcement. RecentChanges can only inform the community what's going on, but it does not demand action. This leads to such things as vandalism not being reversed, ContentSwizzling, and any number of other negative trends. The lesson is simple. There must be a CommunityExpectation to investigate what's happening all the time.
On the other hand, since the changes live in the WikiNow, it's also possible a much later reader will reverse the changes. The problem here is that casual reading does not show you conveniently differences between versions, unlike RecentChanges that gives you a convenient link to the diff. UseModWiki offers the user preference to show diffs all the time, however the QuickDiff? system isn't very subtle. The WhyClublet "gold bar" difference goes a much further way to ensure that PeerReview continues long after the change was initially made.