[Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)

[Chad]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:44 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 2010/3/1 Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com>:
>> I think it would be great if someone
>> on the project could put the initial tone aside, turn the other cheek,
>> and let everyone interested (and I know there are several) know what's
>> going on.
>
> Hi Austin et al.,
>
> William has already posted extensively on this topic, so I'll keep it
> simple. Since our last update in January [1], Aaron has continued to
> work [2] through the list of issues [3] specific to the enwiki feature
> request called "Flagged Protection". The current version of
> FlaggedRevs has dependencies on MediaWiki core that haven't been
> deployed yet, and the labs sites run on the same code tree, so Aaron
> is now backporting the extension to work with the currently deployed
> MediaWiki version, so he can pull the update to labs. Rob has also
> separately re-purposed one of the servers from our main cluster, which
> Aaron and Rob will set up as a separate testing environment that can
> run any code, but which will need to resemble a roughly
> production-equivalent system setup so that any observed behavior
> matches what we will observe in a full production deployment.
>
> William will post a more detailed update once the new code is
> available for public testing. We'll need to test both the enwiki setup
> and common existing configurations to ensure that we're not breaking
> any pre-existing configurations, as we're not intending to fork the
> extension.
>
> Looking forward, our UX team has recently contracted Ryan Lane to
> develop a new QA pipeline that supports easy spin-up of prototype
> sites, as well as automated interaction testing using Selenium. [4] So
> far, they've been using Linode VMs for prototype.wikimedia.org, but
> their performance characteristics haven't been consistent with our
> needs.
>
> We're very thankful for Aaron's hard work on the FlaggedRevs extension
> over the years; it's really almost entirely due to him that the
> extension is now in active use in more than 20 wikis, with more than
> 1M pages patrolled in dewiki alone. That's an amazing achievement for
> one young, talented engineer. And we're also grateful to William and
> Howie for helping to guide the process, especially after Brion's
> departure.
>
> With that said, the concepts of FlaggedRevs pre-date even WMF itself,
> and first development work began when the organization just had a tiny
> number of employees. As a result, the process has involved almost
> every single stakeholder in the Wikimedia movement (having an opinion,
> not writing actual code), and as a product development process, been
> entirely broken. We'll see it to further deployment, but of course
> it's not the panacea that some people think it is; everyone means
> something different when they talk about it, and there's a lot more
> work to be done in the problem-space.
>
> Through investments like the UX team, WMF is now building its capacity
> for team-based product development, and ultimately, the tools we
> develop to deal with quality assessment, moderation and labeling (and
> IMO labeling is just as much a component of the BLP problem as edit
> moderation) will need to be part of our overall product roadmap and be
> tackled by the team as a whole. But, there are no shortcuts: new hires
> take time to get productive, legacy projects need to be carefully
> transitioned, and operations capacity (both staffing and resources)
> needs to grow commensurate with new challenges. WMF is doing more than
> ever before to serve its mission, but aspirations typically grow more
> quickly than foundations.
>
> All best,
> Erik
>
> [1] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/flagged-revisions-your-questions-answered/
> [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/aaron
> [3] http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
> [4] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resources#Interaction_testing_automation
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

I'm curious as to whether there's anything official behind this poll[1] on
en.wikipedia to "simply turn on flagged revs in the form that the Germans
use it" until the proposed enwiki changes are ready.

-Chad

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/poll