[WikiEN-l] Who gets to flag? (BBC Newsnight tonight! re: flagged revs)

[David Gerard]

2009/8/26 FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com>:

> Try this as a general approach:
>   - This is not a new idea.
>   - We've got vandalism down to under one article in 200, and a variety of
>   advanced programs and patrols of hundreds of users who get the usual fixing
>   time down to seconds or minutes when it does happen.
>   - But obviously we want to do even better.
>   - A lot of people gauge Wikipedia in terms of quantity of edits. The last
>   2 years the focus has been on improving quality of edits, and especially,
>   finding even better ways to prevent deliberately harmful edits such as
>   vandalism.
>   - Our historical answer is "protection" - everyone is prevented from
>   editing a page if it is being badly mis-edited. That's highly disruptive and
>   frustrates many edits since one bad apple can hold up the process.
>   - A more recent addition is the Abuse filter, a system that allows
>   flagrantly bad edits to be prevented but lets through good ones. It's a
>   program though so it can't differentiate apparently good posts that are
>   really not good.
>   - Our newest answer is therefore this thing called "flagged revisions" -
>   the requirement that when an edit is made to a sensitive article, someone
>   who's been round a while, which is one of thousands of users, checks to say
>   it's okay, before letting it go "live".
>   - Our test bed has been the german wikipedia, the second largest language
>   to English in the Wikipedia websites.
>   - Our main target and test bed is articles about people, because those
>   are seen to be more sensitive and of special importance to get right. The
>   wider reported vandalism cases usually relate to these articles, just
>   because articles about people are so visible. So it makes sense to apply
>   possible solutions to these and see what effect it has on editing quantity
>   and quality.
> That's how I'd explain it (condensed and simplified as needed for the media
> concerned).


Or, to precis:

1.) Oxygen is good.
2.) Competition is bad.
3.) I like jello.

Leave out the jello to avoid any confusion.


- d.