2009/8/27 Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com>om>:
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?
I was trying to answer this myself last night, so here's my best attempt :-)
So, quick questions:
1) Is this going to apply to every page?
No. It's effectively a new form of protection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection#Description
...so basically, any page that might get semi-protected might get
this. The original idea of "use this for BLPs" , to my surprise,
doesn't seem to be very much in force; it's not going to be
blanket-applied to those 400,000 articles, as far as I can tell.
There's also a *second* system going in, applied to all pages -
patrolled revisions - which is essentially a passive monitoring
mechanism and won't in any way affect what version readers see. I'll
concentrate only on flagged protection here, since it seems to be the
contentious one!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Patrolled_revisions
2) Who gets to flag a revision? Can you flag your own
reivsions?
Users in the "reviewer" usergroup, which will initially be all admins
but can be given out to others; there'll no doubt be a process for
this. I believe if you can flag you can flag your own edits - it may
be that they're done automatically, I'm not clear on this.
3) What's the interface like? How many clicks?
Don't know, but a testing version is being set up.
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
4) Is there any automatic flagging?
See #2; not sure.
5) Are you supposed to "check" an entire
article prior to flagging it?
The idea is you check everything since the last reviewed edit; ie,
"check since last known good version".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reviewing_guideline
For "fully protected" pages, changes should only be approved if
there's consensus for them, or if it's trivial; for "semi-protected"
pages, just so long as the edit's not crap.
How confident are you meant to be?
How confident are you about rolling back edits today? ;-)
6) What will encourage flaggers to actually bother
flagging articles?
This, I don't know. Protected articles usually have someone who's
protected them; it could be we'll find that if you protect an article,
there's an assumption it's your job to make sure there's no flagging
backlog - a name and shame policy. ;-)
Alternatively, if this gets incorporated into one of the automatic
editing tools - which it probably will, in time - we'll no doubt be
able to tap into the broad pool of automated-editing "vandal fighters"
etc.
I suspect it'll backlog early and then improve over time, since once
'reviewer' is spread broadly enough - say, to a couple of times the
current admin pool, four thousand of our current ten or fifteen
thousand active users - then most flag-protected articles will be
edited regularly by them in the normal run of things, too. If *anyone*
with reviewer rights is currently working with an article, chances are
it'll get frequently reviewed - because they want their edits to show
up as much as anyone.
7) What will encourage non-flaggers to actually bother
editing
articles when they don't have any instant gratification?
The cynic in me says they won't realise they don't get instant
gratification until after they've edited it ;-). More practically,
flagged protection will cover a few thousand pages - at worst, we're
still talking less than one percent of pages. Many contributors won't
encounter a flag-protected page from one month to the next.
I think it'll annoy some people a bit, and it'll *really* annoy some
people who want to be really annoyed about it, but after two months
people'll assume this is the way protection has always been.
8) Which view will long time editors see by default?
Stable (flagged)
or non-flagged version?
I am not sure, but they'll be trivially able to switch between them -
have a look at a dewiki page, with its little button in the top right
- and they'll always *edit* the most recent (non-flagged) version.
9) Can non-logged in editors see non-flagged versions?
So I am informed, but they have to go looking for them - it's like old
history versions now.
10) Will this destroy Wikipedia?
11) Will this improve Wikipedia?
"Answer hazy, ask again later". I suspect in the long run it won't do
much difference, but it'll be *blamed* (or credited) for any enormous
turnarounds; someone I was talking to was swearing blind it destroyed
dewiki, caused a catastrophic collapse in the number of IP editors,
but on examining the statistics that actually happened six months
earlier!
If any of this is wrong, please let me know; I've tried to
double-check my details, but I'm not 100% confident I've interpreted
it all accurately.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk