[Wikiquality-l] Flagged Revisions too intrusive

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/23/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Even though I agree with Ulrich that it is wiser to trial something
> like this as an on/off switch on selected pages (yeah yeah, I don't
> mind repeating myself), I am convinced that it will be possible to
> improve the scalability of the feature quite massively. There are
> quite a few things we aren't doing yet, including
[...]

You have some good suggestions there: some that have been around for a
while too and not implemented (mass review), some which are partially
implemented via external tools for some projects already (content
based reverting is done by some bots on enwp for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot), and some ideas I hadn't
previously seen (third party credentials).

To add to this discussion I'd like to point out that the review
process for the flagging should be a lot like the review process
people are already doing with watchlists and recent changes.

If you accept the idea that they should be similar then I think there
are two possibilities:

(1) That the existing review processes are fairly effective at viewing
most revisions in a reasonable time.  If this is true, then we already
have the resources and interest needed and flagging should not hurt.

(2) That the existing review process is not reaching most pages in a
reasonable amount of time.  If this is true then we will have some
challenges getting enough effort behind flagging, but it is all the
more important that flagging be enabled since if this theory is true
then our sites are frequently distributing completely unchecked
content.

My expirence tells me that (1) is probably true and that the gaps we
currently have in our checking are due to the lack of ability to track
checked pages in a scalable way. Flagging solves that issue.

Mark as patrolled also solved that issue, but mark-as-patrolled was a
failure on most projects (although the Dutch still use it). I think it
is widely believed that mark as patrol failed for most projects
because it was only a marker that didn't actually do anything
important so nothing encourages people to keep up with it. The
flagging system solves that issue by influencing the default page view
for the public... something most Wikipedians will care a lot about.