All -

I would appreciate help with the following announcement. As with the previous announcement, I'd like it to be sent to as many language mailing lists & village pumps as possible. My plan is to send the English language announcement on Wednesday, June 4, at 11:00 UTC to foundation-l and all multilingual and English language project mailing lists. I would need your help to send it to other lists, languages & places.

Announcement follows.

Thanks for any & all help, Erik

Subject: Important: New edit patrolling features available

As of today, the "FlaggedRevs" extension is available to any wiki community that wishes to use it. FlaggedRevs is a tool for patrolling changes, identifying high quality article versions, and changing the default version shown to unregistered users. It's highly configurable. As such, we're making it available in two configurations:

1) A minimally intrusive "patrolling" configuration; 2) Custom configurations per your request.

== Who needs this feature and where can I see it? ==

Larger wiki communities will probably benefit more from the use of this feature than smaller ones. If you have problems keeping vandalism in check, and/or want to experiment with new ways to identify high quality content, you should look into this functionality.

You can see an English language demo installation of the feature at: http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/

The feature is in production use on the German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/

The German Wikipedia uses a custom configuration where the most recent vandalism-patrolled version, if any, is shown to unregistered users. You can track the progress of their use of the patrolling feature here:

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=english

== Patrolling Configuration ==

In the Patrolling Configuration, any user who has been registered for more than 21 days and has made at least 150 edits will be automatically given the permission to patrol changes for vandalism. Only changes made by users who are not permitted to patrol changes need to be patrolled.

In addition, sysops will be given the permission to flag versions of "featured articles" in accordance with existing nomination processes. (In other words, this gives you the ability to identify specific _versions_ of an article as "featured", rather than the article as a whole.) Finally, sysops will be permitted to define on a per-page basis that changes need to be patrolled before being visible to unregistered readers. This is an alternative to semi-protection; it doesn't make sense to use both on a given page.

The use of these features is subject to policies that your wiki community will need to develop. They should be used carefully until such a policy is in place.

To activate the patrolling configuration,

1) File a request on http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ of type "enhancement", component "site request". You may need to create a BugZilla account to do this.

2) Title your request "Enable FlaggedRevs Patrolling Configuration on (my project name)".

3) Post a link to your BugZilla request to your project's "Village pump" and mailing list, if available.

If there are no objections on the BugZilla page, the request will be considered valid after 7 days. (It may still take a while longer to process it.)

== Custom Configurations ==

The FlaggedRevs extension is highly flexible in its configuration. We are willing to accommodate custom requests. Since some configurations of FlaggedRevs could be considered highly disruptive, the requirements are somewhat higher.

1) Read about the configuration options at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs and experiment with the live demo at: http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/

2) Create a page in the "Project:" namespace (e.g. "Wikipedia:", "Wikibooks:") of your wiki community describing the configuration you want to use.

3) Create a BugZilla request as above, titled "Enable FlaggedRevs custom configuration on (my project name)" pointing to the proposal page you have created. Provide an English translation of all relevant information if possible - or we may not be able to help you.

4) Post a link to your proposal and to the BugZilla request to the various relevant channels of your wiki community, e.g. "village pump", mailing list.

If there are no objections within 14 days, your request will be considered valid. If there are objections, please try building consensus. If necessary, you can also resort to a poll (a very large majority, at least two thirds, is generally necessary).

Note that custom configurations will take longer to process, and might sit in the technical support queue for several weeks.

Our developers will _only_ look at the information attached to the BugZilla request, so please make sure that everything relevant is at least linked from there.

== Translators needed ==

The user interface of the FlaggedRevs extension needs to be translated into as many languages as possible. The extension can be localized using http://translatewiki.net/ - please follow the instructions there to become a translator.

== User interface developers needed ==

If you are a PHP developer with JavaScript/CSS experience, your help in improving the user interface experience (by improving the CSS or adding AJAX features) would be appreciated. Just check out a fresh copy of the MediaWiki code and the FlaggedRevs code and get started:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversion http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs

If you need committer access to our version control system, please e-mail <commitaccess at wikimedia dot org>, attaching your SSH key and desired username as per the above link.