[Foundation-l] Reviewed and Unvandalized Versions

[P. Birken]

Hi List,

Délphine told me that the news about stable versions has led to
discussions in several projects. As the discussion on the
germanlanguage Wikipedia are, well, in german, here is some short
information in english about all this.

When Jimbo visited Germany in June, me and other members of the german
community approached him about stable versions. After some discussion,
he decided that it would be good to finally start with stable versions
and, as this is a very fundamental change,  to use one project as a
testing ground before starting this everywhere. As you know, we are
the lucky ones ;-)

A few parameters were agreed upon, namely that it should be kept
simple, in particular that what version is marked and what is not,
should not be the result of some voting process and that we need to
seperate two issues of stable versions: fighting vandalism and
controlling the factual accuracy. Thus, a concept was then worked out,
based on the discussions on meta, en and de and Brion was assigned
with implementing it, which he is still busy with and it will still be
some months before this actually goes life.

A first decision was not to call this stable versions, as this is a
term where everybody understands something different. Therefore, the
following are the concepts:

i) Unvandalized versions
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gesichtete Versionen). An
unvandalized version is a version of an article that has not been
vandalized. The right to flag a version like this is given to accounts
by an automatic process, based on the number of edits and the time
passed since account creation. We will start the test with 30 edits/30
days. Versions can be flagged similar to the small changes mark with
some features to make life easy, like automatic marking of articles
newly created by users with this right.

ii) Reviewed versions
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geprüfte_Versionen). The
meaning of this version is that the article contains no factual errors
and that there are no misleading omissions, while not requiring any
other form of completeness. The right to flag an article like this is
given by a bureaucrat. This flag can also be removed again and the
same version may be flagged by multiple users. We agree that the
reviewers should come from an active portal in the wikipedia. The
discussion on qualifications from within the wikipedia respectively
from outside the wikipedia is going on. The notion of outside experts
is also discussed.

iii) Who sees what? Nothing is changed for logged in users. IPs see
the latest reviewed or unvandalized versions, meaning that the
reviewed version has no priority over an unvandalized version. If the
version the IP sees is not the current one, a warning is shown with
links to the current version. If no version of the article was ever
flagged, a warning is shown. Note that this point is subject to
MediaWiki settings, meaning that if in your project/wiki, this sounds
like a contraproductive idea, you can turn it off, which is important
for example in young wikipedias.

Sincerely yours,

de:P. Birken