The New York Times' "Bits" blog has an article on the Flagged Revisions proposal:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/wikipedia-may-restrict-publics-abil...
William King (Willking1979)
I'm famous. :-) The article mentions "The response was immediate and deafening, with headlines like: 'Jimbo Wales, stop acting dictator.'" I created the headline mentioned.
The article is reasonably accurate, although "The idea in a nutshell is that only registered, reliable users would have the right to have their material immediately appear to the general public visiting Wikipedia. Other contributors would be able to edit articles, but their changes will be held back until one of these reliable users has signed off, or "flagged" the revisions. (Registered, reliable users would see the latest edit to an article, whether flagged or not.)" is confusing at best, misleading at worst.
Cheers,
—Thomas Larsen
2009/1/24 Thomas Larsen larsen.thomas.h@gmail.com:
The article is reasonably accurate, although "The idea in a nutshell is that only registered, reliable users would have the right to have their material immediately appear to the general public visiting Wikipedia. Other contributors would be able to edit articles, but their changes will be held back until one of these reliable users has signed off, or "flagged" the revisions. (Registered, reliable users would see the latest edit to an article, whether flagged or not.)" is confusing at best, misleading at worst.
Sounds right to me, except they missed the bit where it's only going to be activated on a subset of articles (at least at first).
On Jan 23, 2009, at 5:36 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Sounds right to me, except they missed the bit where it's only going to be activated on a subset of articles (at least at first).
Sort of... they do quote Wales as saying "we will only be using it on a subset of articles."
--Noah--
...
confusing at best, misleading at worst.
To be fair, that goes for pretty much every explanation of how Flagged Revisions will work that I've seen/heard. That's because * no one agrees on the implementation * the feature itself is confusing even to a long term user who understands the current system, never mind the general public
The main interest to me is in the comments section, where there is some indication of what the Wikipedia using masses (and Gregory Kohs) think. But my absolute favourite is:
"I tried editing an article on Mark Linn-Baker once, adding a edit to the article to include a credit for his role in the film, "My Favorite Year". As far as I could tell, the edit complied with all Wikipedia rules. That edit was immediately deleted. As a result, I believe that Wikipedia is completely fraudulent and untrustworthy, just like Fox News, the Republican Party, the Democratic Leadership Council, the National Enquirer, the Ku Klux Klan Monthly, and the Volkischer Beobachter"
the wub