Controversial articles must not be constantly backlogged because reviewers are afraid of getting drawn into an edit war.
I get the impression from this statement that traditional full dispute protection will still be needed. Will this still be available?
Emily On Aug 27, 2009, at 5:58 AM, Apoc 2400 wrote:
So apparently all the press reporting is wrong. What's the real story? For some reason, I've never actually come across these flagged revisions, partly because they always seemed to be happening "in the future some time". What's the policy going to be?
You get different answers depending on who you ask. This is because people tend to tell you how they want it to be rather than what the community actually approved. Even Jimbo and the foundation staff have been guilty of this.
What is being implemented has two parts, flagged protection and patrolled revisions. The important part is flagged protection. It is a new kind of protection besides full and semi. When an article is flagged-protected readers will not see a new version until it has been flagged.
- Is this going to apply to every page?
No, only on pages that are flagged-protected individually. I expect there will be a push to flagged-protect all BLPs (biographies of living people) but nothing is decided yet. I would personally support that if there are enough reviewers to keep the backlog short.
- Who gets to flag a revision? Can you flag your own reivsions?
This is very much undecided. Some think becoming a reviewer should be like autoconfirmation, some think like rollback, while a few think it should be harder to get than adminship. Hopefully it will be adjusted depending on how many reviewers are needed.
- What's the interface like? How many clicks?
I don't know yet. There is a test implementation at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org
- Is there any automatic flagging?
There are actually three levels of flagged protection. In semi flagged protection edits by autoconfirmed users are automatically flagged. In intermediary flagged protection (probably the most common case) only edits by reviewers are automatically flagged. In full flagged protection only administrators (not reviewers) can flag.
- Are you supposed to "check" an entire article prior to flagging
it? How confident are you meant to be?
The reviewer is only meant to check the diff from the previous flagged version. It should be checked for:
- conflict with the Biographies of Living People policy
- vandalism or patent nonsense
- copyright violations
- legal threats, personal attacks or libel.
Reviewers are not required to check for neutrality, original research, sources, etc. Of course, obvious cases are better reverted right away than flagged. I expect there will be some conflict over this. In my opinion it is very important that we keep the flow of Bold, Revert, Discuss. Controversial articles must not be constantly backlogged because reviewers are afraid of getting drawn into an edit war.
- What will encourage flaggers to actually bother flagging articles?
Who knows? We'll see.
- What will encourage non-flaggers to actually bother editing
articles when they don't have any instant gratification?
Good question. Perhaps that an edit will eventually go live unless it's really bad.
- Which view will long time editors see by default? Stable (flagged)
or non-flagged version?
I think flagged, but you can change it in your preferences.
- Can non-logged in editors see non-flagged versions?
I am quite sure yes.
- Will this destroy Wikipedia?
Surely not. The potential problems depend on how quickly edits get flagged and how strict reviewers are. If it takes weeks before anyone even looks at an edit and reviewers refuse to flag anything they don't actively like, then we are no more open than Britannica. After all, I can email a suggested change to them and probably get a reply. Our advantages are:
- You can edit right in the code rather than describe your change in
an email
- Edits don't just get lost in someones inbox. Eventually an edit is
either approved or reverted.
- Speed, if we manage
- A more open attitude, I wish
Remember also that later edits build on the latest draft. There is no branching so a new persons edits cannot be left unflagged while the regulars keep editing.
- Will this improve Wikipedia?
Hopefully. Especially for BLPs I think this has a lot of potential. Currently a damaging edit can last way too long in articles about obscure but notable people.
So far I ignored the second part: patrolled revisions. This is enabled on all articles, but readers see the latest version whether flagged or not. It is used to know whether an edit has been checked or not, so the time of recent changes patrollers can be used more efficiently. Whether it will actually be used on all articles is unsure. I expect it will be used mostly on BLPs, and on other articles if the reviewers have time.
Finally, this is supposed to be a two month trial. What happens after that is very uncertain.
For details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revi... the subpages linked at the top.
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