[WikiEN-l] So, what is the deal with flagged revisions?

[Andrew Gray]

2009/8/27 Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com>:
> So apparently all the press reporting is wrong. What's the real story?
> For some reason, I've never actually come across these flagged
> revisions, partly because they always seemed to be happening "in the
> future some time". What's the policy going to be?

I was trying to answer this myself last night, so here's my best attempt :-)

> So, quick questions:
> 1) Is this going to apply to every page?

No. It's effectively a new form of protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection#Description

...so basically, any page that might get semi-protected might get
this. The original idea of "use this for BLPs" , to my surprise,
doesn't seem to be very much in force; it's not going to be
blanket-applied to those 400,000 articles, as far as I can tell.

There's also a *second* system going in, applied to all pages -
patrolled revisions - which is essentially a passive monitoring
mechanism and won't in any way affect what version readers see. I'll
concentrate only on flagged protection here, since it seems to be the
contentious one!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Patrolled_revisions

> 2) Who gets to flag a revision? Can you flag your own reivsions?

Users in the "reviewer" usergroup, which will initially be all admins
but can be given out to others; there'll no doubt be a process for
this. I believe if you can flag you can flag your own edits - it may
be that they're done automatically, I'm not clear on this.

> 3) What's the interface like? How many clicks?

Don't know, but a testing version is being set up.

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

> 4) Is there any automatic flagging?

See #2; not sure.

> 5) Are you supposed to "check" an entire article prior to flagging it?

The idea is you check everything since the last reviewed edit; ie,
"check since last known good version".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reviewing_guideline

For "fully protected" pages, changes should only be approved if
there's consensus for them, or if it's trivial; for "semi-protected"
pages, just so long as the edit's not crap.

> How confident are you meant to be?

How confident are you about rolling back edits today? ;-)

> 6) What will encourage flaggers to actually bother flagging articles?

This, I don't know. Protected articles usually have someone who's
protected them; it could be we'll find that if you protect an article,
there's an assumption it's your job to make sure there's no flagging
backlog - a name and shame policy. ;-)

Alternatively, if this gets incorporated into one of the automatic
editing tools - which it probably will, in time - we'll no doubt be
able to tap into the broad pool of automated-editing "vandal fighters"
etc.

I suspect it'll backlog early and then improve over time, since once
'reviewer' is spread broadly enough - say, to a couple of times the
current admin pool, four thousand of our current ten or fifteen
thousand active users - then most flag-protected articles will be
edited regularly by them in the normal run of things, too. If *anyone*
with reviewer rights is currently working with an article, chances are
it'll get frequently reviewed - because they want their edits to show
up as much as anyone.

> 7) What will encourage non-flaggers to actually bother editing
> articles when they don't have any instant gratification?

The cynic in me says they won't realise they don't get instant
gratification until after they've edited it ;-). More practically,
flagged protection will cover a few thousand pages - at worst, we're
still talking less than one percent of pages. Many contributors won't
encounter a flag-protected page from one month to the next.

I think it'll annoy some people a bit, and it'll *really* annoy some
people who want to be really annoyed about it, but after two months
people'll assume this is the way protection has always been.

> 8) Which view will long time editors see by default? Stable (flagged)
> or non-flagged version?

I am not sure, but they'll be trivially able to switch between them -
have a look at a dewiki page, with its little button in the top right
- and they'll always *edit* the most recent (non-flagged) version.

> 9) Can non-logged in editors see non-flagged versions?

So I am informed, but they have to go looking for them - it's like old
history versions now.

> 10) Will this destroy Wikipedia?
> 11) Will this improve Wikipedia?

"Answer hazy, ask again later". I suspect in the long run it won't do
much difference, but it'll be *blamed* (or credited) for any enormous
turnarounds; someone I was talking to was swearing blind it destroyed
dewiki, caused a catastrophic collapse in the number of IP editors,
but on examining the statistics that actually happened six months
earlier!

If any of this is wrong, please let me know; I've tried to
double-check my details, but I'm not 100% confident I've interpreted
it all accurately.

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