2009/8/27 Steve Bennett <stevag...@gmail.com>: > So apparently all the press reporting is wrong. What's the real story? > For some reason, I've never actually come across these flagged > revisions, partly because they always seemed to be happening "in the > future some time". What's the policy going to be?
I was trying to answer this myself last night, so here's my best attempt :-) > So, quick questions: > 1) Is this going to apply to every page? No. It's effectively a new form of protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection#Description ...so basically, any page that might get semi-protected might get this. The original idea of "use this for BLPs" , to my surprise, doesn't seem to be very much in force; it's not going to be blanket-applied to those 400,000 articles, as far as I can tell. There's also a *second* system going in, applied to all pages - patrolled revisions - which is essentially a passive monitoring mechanism and won't in any way affect what version readers see. I'll concentrate only on flagged protection here, since it seems to be the contentious one! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Patrolled_revisions > 2) Who gets to flag a revision? Can you flag your own reivsions? Users in the "reviewer" usergroup, which will initially be all admins but can be given out to others; there'll no doubt be a process for this. I believe if you can flag you can flag your own edits - it may be that they're done automatically, I'm not clear on this. > 3) What's the interface like? How many clicks? Don't know, but a testing version is being set up. http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page > 4) Is there any automatic flagging? See #2; not sure. > 5) Are you supposed to "check" an entire article prior to flagging it? The idea is you check everything since the last reviewed edit; ie, "check since last known good version". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reviewing_guideline For "fully protected" pages, changes should only be approved if there's consensus for them, or if it's trivial; for "semi-protected" pages, just so long as the edit's not crap. > How confident are you meant to be? How confident are you about rolling back edits today? ;-) > 6) What will encourage flaggers to actually bother flagging articles? This, I don't know. Protected articles usually have someone who's protected them; it could be we'll find that if you protect an article, there's an assumption it's your job to make sure there's no flagging backlog - a name and shame policy. ;-) Alternatively, if this gets incorporated into one of the automatic editing tools - which it probably will, in time - we'll no doubt be able to tap into the broad pool of automated-editing "vandal fighters" etc. I suspect it'll backlog early and then improve over time, since once 'reviewer' is spread broadly enough - say, to a couple of times the current admin pool, four thousand of our current ten or fifteen thousand active users - then most flag-protected articles will be edited regularly by them in the normal run of things, too. If *anyone* with reviewer rights is currently working with an article, chances are it'll get frequently reviewed - because they want their edits to show up as much as anyone. > 7) What will encourage non-flaggers to actually bother editing > articles when they don't have any instant gratification? The cynic in me says they won't realise they don't get instant gratification until after they've edited it ;-). More practically, flagged protection will cover a few thousand pages - at worst, we're still talking less than one percent of pages. Many contributors won't encounter a flag-protected page from one month to the next. I think it'll annoy some people a bit, and it'll *really* annoy some people who want to be really annoyed about it, but after two months people'll assume this is the way protection has always been. > 8) Which view will long time editors see by default? Stable (flagged) > or non-flagged version? I am not sure, but they'll be trivially able to switch between them - have a look at a dewiki page, with its little button in the top right - and they'll always *edit* the most recent (non-flagged) version. > 9) Can non-logged in editors see non-flagged versions? So I am informed, but they have to go looking for them - it's like old history versions now. > 10) Will this destroy Wikipedia? > 11) Will this improve Wikipedia? "Answer hazy, ask again later". I suspect in the long run it won't do much difference, but it'll be *blamed* (or credited) for any enormous turnarounds; someone I was talking to was swearing blind it destroyed dewiki, caused a catastrophic collapse in the number of IP editors, but on examining the statistics that actually happened six months earlier! If any of this is wrong, please let me know; I've tried to double-check my details, but I'm not 100% confident I've interpreted it all accurately. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l