[WikiEN-l] [Wikimediauk-l] BBC Newsnight tonight! re: flagged revs

[Andrew Gray]

2009/8/25 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>
> I don't want to confuse stuff at all. I just confused the hell out of
> the researcher on the phone trying to keep stuff simple ... so it's
> going to be REALLY  DUMB SOUNDBITES ALL THE WAY.

Points I'd try to remember, in no particular order:

* this isn't locking down editing, it's more open than it sounds
* it's to a large degree an anti-vandalism tool, to stop articles
being degraded, rather than to limit them improving - it's not for
content control, we have protection for that
* it's worked on dewiki so far - some problems, mostly delays, we'll
see if they recur, but it's not caused a complete collapse of
everything
* we've been thinking about this for a long time, unlike some past changes

Final details will be announced soon, this is all provisional, maybe
mention something about Wikimania as an ongoing conference where the
details will emerge.

The other thing, of course, is emphasising the BLP article part of it
- we want to get these right, we have less room to screw up there -
but I don't know how much we want to play that if it's still unclear
what the final rollout is going to be!

There's a bit over 400,000 BLPs out of 3m plus articles; that's a bit
under 15% of all our articles. It's hard to say what proportion of our
pageviews that represent, but I would put a small amount of money on
"more than average". We certainly know they have a disproportionate
effect in terms of the amount of complaints and corrections we get
sent; around a third of articles we get contacted about are BLPs.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk