Poor, Edmund W wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Magnus Manske [mailto:magnus.manske@web.de] Sent: Wednesday,
November 02, 2005 3:56 AM
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Slipping quality as Wikipedia gets bigger
(formerlyCan you trust Wikipedia?)
Well, as the author of said feature, I've been asking for a long
time what's the holdup. I'm fairly certain it is, at the very least,
ready for the planned test phase. I keep asking people what should
be fixed, but so far (that is, in the last few month) noone could
tell me the reason it remains turned off.
If parts of it are broken or not up to MediaWiki standard or
Evil(tm) in some other important way, please, PLEASE tell me so I
can fix it.
Should I backport it from CVS HEAD to some other branch? Which one?
Anything!
So far, I've been mostly ignored.
Magnus
Please put this feature into effect immediately! If we don't like it, we
can always turn it off afterwards. But we will NEVER know if thousands
of Wikipedians will like it if we wait for an overwhelming clamor on
this mailing list.
Ed Poor
I really think that ratings are vital, in order to deal with improving
and maintaining Wikipedia's quality as its size and audience scales.
If the ratings code is a performance, hog, at least trying it
experimentally will find out how bad the problem is, and perhaps
illuminate how it could be fixed to make it better. I can think of
lots of potential strategies for doing this, but it would be nice to
see the problem in reality, rather than in theory, before trying to
fix it.
Perhaps the rating code could be turned on only for admins, or users
with usernames beginning with 'E' to 'J', or only during non-busy
hours... or automatically turned off if load rises over a pre-set limit?
Or perhaps just turned on for a few hours one weekend, to see what the
effect on load really is?
-- Neil
Just to clarify this: I'm not proposing to permanently restrict rating
to admins or any other subgroup -- any user, logged in or not, should
eventually be able to rate articles, just as they can edit them.
The idea of restrictions is to solely prevent initial testing from
killing the system, after which the range of allowed users can be
progressively increased, eventually to include all users as soon as
system resources or code optimization permit.
The sooner the system is tested, the sooner it can be in shape for full
production use.
-- Neil