2009/9/21 Brian <brian.min...@colorado.edu>: > It's hard to follow everything that goes on here, but I distinctly remember > when FlaggedRevisions was developed, and per my recollection openness was > not one of the original arguments that caused the foundation to contract its > development. If anyone knows more than me and cares to clear up my > misconceptions, that'd be great.
Flagged Revisions type systems were discussed back in 2002-2003, long before BLPs became a focal point of concerns, as a method of "sifting" articles from Wikipedia into stable versions. The idea that flagging could increase openness for some pages is also not just some recently applied "spin". I wrote an essay three years ago when the discussion about a specific implementation became more serious, detailing my own recommendations for some of the functional requirements of a flagging system: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/WikiQA "However, as noted above, a global setting to show sighted revisions in preference to unsighted ones should not be enabled unless and until it is found to scale sufficiently well, and to not have a dramatic negative impact on the user experience. Instead, revision preference should first be enabled on a per-page level, allowing administrators to "quality protect" pages. This would be an alternative to full protection or semi-protection, and allow edits to be made where it is currently impossible. The criteria for quality protecting pages could be expanded over time, allowing for community-directed application of the functionality, rather than an a priori assumption of scalability." The group of users on the German Wikipedia favoring a flagging system preferred a more conservative implementation, which was my primary motivation for writing the essay. As a Board member at the time, I shared my recommendations with Jimmy and others, and we agreed back then that a model that allowed an increase in openness on pages that are currently semi-protected would be preferable for en.wp. This is ultimately also what the en.wp community concluded. It's only fair to acknowledge, of course, that a significantly larger number of pages may end up being "flagged protected" than are currently semi-protected, resulting in an experience of reduced openness/immediacy for the pages not previously included in the set. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l