[WikiEN-l] assessing

[David Gerard]

2009/9/11 Surreptitiousness <surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com>:

>   Yes, the article will no longer be a working draft.
> Blimey, this really is a big change.  Now I understand why I saw you on
> newsnight. Hmmm.


Yeah. I think it was on Newsnight because of journalistic August, but
it's big news in the Wikipedia editing community ;-)

de:wp went to flagged revs on all pages. We'll be doing it by using it
to open up editing on pages that would otherwise be protected, so that
the flagging will be an increase of freedom from present rather than a
decrease.


>  So if the page is no longer a working draft, what does
> that mean for the consensus by editing method we've utilised until now?
> Is this why there is talk of 20 000 new editors needed, because there'll
> be a page like recent changes and we need people to sit there and
> manually sign off on every edit? I think from what I can make out
> certain groups of users are already signed off?


I think that was a number pulled out of the air by one journalist who
didn't understand how Wikipedia works and repeated by others. If you
don't understand something, make some crap up! If you don't want to do
that, copy some crap someone else made up!

(No-one who's ever dealt with the press in practice would assume
"newspaper = reliable source." Anyone who does, I'll point at you and
laugh.)

The reviewer power will be with the admins first and they can grant it
to others. I don't think there's a criterion yet, I suspect it'll be
pretty easy to get, like rollback.


>  Damn, if only my german
> was better I'd go see how it works. And this is important to the point
> we need to make it work, isn't it?


I'm a big, big fan of the idea and even I have trepidation it'll kill
the immediacy of editing if overapplied. We run the trial and see if
it seems okay.


- d.