2009/9/21 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>:
It's hard to follow everything that goes on here,
but I distinctly remember
when FlaggedRevisions was developed, and per my recollection openness was
not one of the original arguments that caused the foundation to contract its
development. If anyone knows more than me and cares to clear up my
misconceptions, that'd be great.
Flagged Revisions type systems were discussed back in 2002-2003, long
before BLPs became a focal point of concerns, as a method of "sifting"
articles from Wikipedia into stable versions. The idea that flagging
could increase openness for some pages is also not just some recently
applied "spin". I wrote an essay three years ago when the discussion
about a specific implementation became more serious, detailing my own
recommendations for some of the functional requirements of a flagging
system:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/WikiQA
"However, as noted above, a global setting to show sighted revisions
in preference to unsighted ones should not be enabled unless and until
it is found to scale sufficiently well, and to not have a dramatic
negative impact on the user experience. Instead, revision preference
should first be enabled on a per-page level, allowing administrators
to "quality protect" pages. This would be an alternative to full
protection or semi-protection, and allow edits to be made where it is
currently impossible. The criteria for quality protecting pages could
be expanded over time, allowing for community-directed application of
the functionality, rather than an a priori assumption of scalability."
The group of users on the German Wikipedia favoring a flagging system
preferred a more conservative implementation, which was my primary
motivation for writing the essay. As a Board member at the time, I
shared my recommendations with Jimmy and others, and we agreed back
then that a model that allowed an increase in openness on pages that
are currently semi-protected would be preferable for en.wp. This is
ultimately also what the en.wp community concluded.
It's only fair to acknowledge, of course, that a significantly larger
number of pages may end up being "flagged protected" than are
currently semi-protected, resulting in an experience of reduced
openness/immediacy for the pages not previously included in the set.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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