[Wikiquality-l] [Wikisource-l] Feedback and beta-testing from non-Wikipedia projects

[Daniel Arnold]

On Monday 15 October 2007 10:46:18 thomasV1 at gmx.de wrote:
> Flaggedrevs had been designed with Wikipedia in mind.
> Writing an encyclopedy article is about confronting multiple
> points of view. During this process, the quality of
> an article might not always improve; the purpose of
> Flaggedrevs is to flag some revisions as "non draft",
> while still allowing users to modify the article.

FlaggedRevs is being pursued mainly by Wikipedians but is has been designed 
very flexible (see the very first posts by P. Birken and Erik in the list 
archive).

Your use case "several authors with different points of views editing an 
article" is only one possible use case and even not the most important one we 
are targetting at right now.

Once again: The basic feature of FlaggedRevs (every user above a certain 
automatic threshold can flag an article version as "non vandalized") provides 
*nothing* against POV and edit wars among editors. It just helps against 
random vandalism ("Peter P. is gay"), some kinds of spam and slashdotting of 
certain articles.

There are stricter levels of flagging in this system such as the "reviewed" 
flag. Only editors in the reviewer group (a user group appointed by the 
bureaucrats) are able to flag an article version as reviewed. It is suggested 
that the first group of these reviewers are academic experts of their 
subject.

However all these flags (number, name), levels (how fine grained), rights (who 
is allowed to set which flag) and display (what to show to the reader) are 
highly customizable by the site admin and adaptable for many needs.

> I do not think that this would be useful for Wikisource.
> A decrease of quality on a wikisource article can be
> agreed upon in a much more objective way. Introducing
> flaggedrevs will likely result on confusion and useless
> complexity.

Quite the contrary FlaggedRevs will be particular useful for Wikisource and 
Wikinews. Currently it is really a pitty to write protect an article within 
these projects after they are completed. This makes it extremly hard to 
maintain these articles, such as removing/renaming images (very frequent 
problem of Commons admins) and adjusting category and template stuff.

With FlaggedRevs you don't need a write protection anylonger in these cases. A 
group of appointed people in Wikisource could flag an article as "ready" and 
every anon reader would see the last flagged version by default. On the other 
side other people can freely edit these pages and changes such as maintenance 
tasks can be done by everyone and from time to time a reviewer can stop by 
and look if these changes were ok or not and could flag them.

This would dramatically improve the work flow of Wikisource and Wikinews which 
is sadly quite closed after a certain time at the moment.

> (I am not even sure if Flaggedrevs will solve the problems
> faced by wikipedia; once the community know what it really
> is about, they might realize technology does not replace
> expertise...)

None expects FlaggedRevs to be the magic solution (again see the very first 
posts). FlaggedRevs is an assistant technology meant to help editors 
focussing on the really hard cases (and not so much on lame random vandalism 
like now).

Arnomane
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