On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.comwrote:
Might it be because they were looked at several times and each time people went "um, not sure about this" and left it for someone else to do? Flagged revisions is serious because the impression is that you are verifying people's work to some standard. Now if someone quote an obscure source, but you don't have or haven't heard of that source, what do you do? Trust the editor? Let it go through anyway? Let someone else deal with it and see a backlog build up?
What I'd like to see is a feature where you can click "not sure" and bump the review up several levels of expertise, so the difficult stuff gets naturally filtered to those with the expertise. Say, subject matter or foreign language, or obscure book. Depending on how flexible such a system is, it might make flagging revisions more efficient, not less.
Training people to do rudimentary and moderate and advanced reviews would be next.
Extremely dififcult to scale and harness the right levels of expertise (from typo-spotting upwards), but very rewarding if done right. One problem is edits that combine different sorts of things, and the "massive chunks of text added in one go".
I presume the current system is a rudimentary one only designed to catch obvious vandalism? If that is the case, people need to be more alert than before (not less) to subtle vandalism and good-faith misrepresentation of sources by poor or skewed writing.
Carcharoth
I think FlaggedRevs main object is to reduce vandalism and obvious misinformation. Its a fairly blunt tool, one that isn't well suited to protecting content more comprehensively. That shouldn't be held against it, in my opinion - it is well suited for the task for which it was intended.
As for an escalation track for flagging a revision based on expertise - well, I don't think that is likely to happen or to work. There are too many obvious flaws for a ladder based system to function. What might conceivably work in this vein is an intermediate flag for a revision that says "expertise needed", but I don't think we've really discussed flagging or not flagging revisions based on evaluations of the depth you're implying. Something that would need probably years more discussion.
Nathan