We expect a publicity storm around pending changes. Jay doesn't currently plan to do a press release as such, but we're definitely getting ready with talking point sheets and Q+As and a blog post and etc. For obvious reasons, this is best drafted in public.
Journalists are <s>simple creatures</s> busy generalists. If you want them to get it right, you have to distill things into a *robust soundbite*. I'm good with soundbites (if I say so myself), but obviously accuracy is rather important.
This is what I have so far, off the top of my head:
"Some of our pages are locked from *anyone* editing them. With this, we can open those up so people can edit the draft version, which then goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour it's too slow. The trial's starting with locked pages about living people. We'll see how it goes."
Now then. That's soundbitey enough it's hard to mess up. But is it factually accurate? I must admit I haven't been keeping up with precisely what this week's consensus is. Corrections please?
[Note: This post is strictly from me as a press volunteer helping WMF and WMUK and likely victim of a melting phone, rather than any official role.]
- d.
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:19 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We expect a publicity storm around pending changes. Jay doesn't currently plan to do a press release as such, but we're definitely getting ready with talking point sheets and Q+As and a blog post and etc. For obvious reasons, this is best drafted in public.
Journalists are <s>simple creatures</s> busy generalists. If you want them to get it right, you have to distill things into a *robust soundbite*. I'm good with soundbites (if I say so myself), but obviously accuracy is rather important.
This is what I have so far, off the top of my head:
"Some of our pages are locked from *anyone* editing them. With this, we can open those up so people can edit the draft version, which then goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour it's too slow. The trial's starting with locked pages about living people. We'll see how it goes."
[snip]
As far as I can tell the living people part isn't accurate.
I suggest:
"Some of our pages are locked from *anyone* editing them. With this, we can open those up so anyone can edit the draft version, which then goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour it's too slow. The trial's starting with a limited number of pages and it is activated with the same process as the one currently used for locking"
Is probably better.
On 8 June 2010 20:24, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
As far as I can tell the living people part isn't accurate.
O rly? New one on me. OK ...
"Some of our pages are locked from *anyone* editing them. With this, we can open those up so anyone can edit the draft version, which then goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour it's too slow. The trial's starting with a limited number of pages and it is activated with the same process as the one currently used for locking" Is probably better.
Thank you :-)
Last sentence: "We'll trial it by putting a small number of pages in 'pending changes' instead of locking them."
That's still grammatically awkward (= bad) and the obvious question is, which pages?
- d.
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:27 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Thank you :-)
Last sentence: "We'll trial it by putting a small number of pages in 'pending changes' instead of locking them."
That's still grammatically awkward (= bad) and the obvious question is, which pages?
Any pages admins choose to do it to. It'll be available through the protection interface. Last I checked there was a technical limit of 2000 pages imposed due to performance concerns.
(Otherwise someone almost certainly would run a but to mass convert every single semi-protected page)
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
(Otherwise someone almost certainly would run a but to mass convert every single semi-protected page)
Is that the new slang for unapproved bots? 8-)
"The Wikipedia's aim is to allow virtually anyone to be able to edit any article. Towards that aim we're testing a scheme where certain articles that may be locked are going to be opened up to editing. Under the new scheme, editing by newer editors will have to be double checked by experienced editors before going live. We expect that the checking will typically have been done in a few minutes or hours."
"At present this is only a test that will only apply to articles about living people."
The points are:
a) it's going to allow people to make good faith changes where they couldn't before b) other editors are going to do the checking not administrators c) it's under testing at the moment. d) it only applies BLP articles
The one sentence challenge is probably something like: "We're doing *limited* testing of a scheme that means that anyone can edit anything but changes must have been viewed by an experienced editor before going live."
On 08/06/2010, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 June 2010 20:24, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
As far as I can tell the living people part isn't accurate.
O rly? New one on me. OK ...
"Some of our pages are locked from *anyone* editing them. With this, we can open those up so anyone can edit the draft version, which then goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour it's too slow. The trial's starting with a limited number of pages and it is activated with the same process as the one currently used for locking" Is probably better.
Thank you :-)
Last sentence: "We'll trial it by putting a small number of pages in 'pending changes' instead of locking them."
That's still grammatically awkward (= bad) and the obvious question is, which pages?
- d.
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On 8 June 2010 20:19, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is what I have so far, off the top of my head:
"Some of our pages are locked from *anyone* editing them. With this, we can open those up so people can edit the draft version, which then goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour it's too slow. The trial's starting with locked pages about living people. We'll see how it goes."
The first problem here is that:
"...people can edit the draft version, which then goes live..."
is really a description of normal editing :-)
But if we include the word "later" it should be okay.
The second problem is that I think we've dropped the BLP issue - many protected pages are BLPs, but they're not the special targets for this.
Thanks for doing this.
On 06/08/2010 12:19 PM, David Gerard wrote:
"Some of our pages are locked from*anyone* editing them. With this, we can open those up so people can edit the draft version, which then goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour it's too slow. The trial's starting with locked pages about living people. We'll see how it goes."
I like this a lot. I'd probably say, "goes live after a quick review" or "a quick double-check".
Technically there are no restrictions about what pages it gets used on, but the number one concern I've heard mentioned is living people, and the biggest concern within that was currently protected pages, so I think that's perfectly fair for a soundbite. You could hedge a little if you wanted. E.g., "The trial's mainly starting with" or "mainly focused on".
I might also say "so anybody can edit the draft version" just to emphasize the shift toward openness.
One thing to note is that we didn't use the word draft in the interface on purpose; there's another feature coming along that had use for that term. But I think saying draft in dealing with the press is fine. Everybody gets drafts and double-checking them.
We have also avoided using the term "publish"; I think "goes live" is a good phrase to stick with.
I do have a fear that reporters, who are embedded in institutions with complicated review flows, will bring a lot of baggage to interpreting this, and so will have notions and potential misunderstandings that are different than the ones we've encountered so far. So if you have a chance before the big push to run your soundbite through a few friendly journalists and see what comes out again, that couldn't hurt.
William
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:48 PM, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote: [snip]
I do have a fear that reporters, who are embedded in institutions with complicated review flows, will bring a lot of baggage to interpreting this, and so will have notions and potential misunderstandings that are different than the ones we've encountered so far. So if you have a chance before the big push to run your soundbite through a few friendly journalists and see what comes out again, that couldn't hurt.
This is why the "review" language has been discouraged by many people. It doesn't just have a loaded meaning for journalists. It implies a gatekeeper functionality that simply does not exist in this process.
I'd rather we just omit the step in between. People will guess, they'll guess wrong. But it will be easier to correct those incorrect guesses if we don't have output apparently claiming them to be correct.
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
d) it only applies BLP articles
Can you identify the origin of this belief? It's not correct. If there is some page still saying/implying this, we need to go fix it.
On 8 June 2010 20:55, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
d) it only applies BLP articles
Can you identify the origin of this belief? It's not correct. If there is some page still saying/implying this, we need to go fix it.
'Cos it was a big part of the plan in past iterations. It was news to me that isn't a current part of the plan, for instance. Though "limited to 2000" is useful. How many pages are currently protected or semi-protected, about 1000?
- d.
On 06/08/2010 12:57 PM, David Gerard wrote:
'Cos it was a big part of the plan in past iterations. It was news to me that isn't a current part of the plan, for instance.
Regarding the BLP question, there's no technical limitation, but that's different than the question of what the community decides it should be used on. If the enwiki community wants to limit it to particular categories and also wants the software to enforce that, I'm glad to see how hard that is to build.
Though "limited to 2000" is useful.
Our current plan is to raise that limit gradually as the performance implications become clear. If the community wants us to keep some hard limit, that's also doable.
William
On 8 June 2010 21:07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Though "limited to 2000" is useful.
Our current plan is to raise that limit gradually as the performance implications become clear. If the community wants us to keep some hard limit, that's also doable.
Are there any technical limits beyond a page count? Can we - for example - use it on talk pages or redirects?
On 06/08/2010 01:08 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
Are there any technical limits beyond a page count? Can we - for example - use it on talk pages or redirects?
I think it's configured per namespace, so one technically could use it for talk pages, but I believe the configuration we're planning for Wikipedia is just main space. Naturally, if the community clamored to apply it elsewhere, it wouldn't be hard to change. We'd want to think through the implications first, though, as we've been focused on articles.
I believe redirects should work, although when I went to double-check on the labs site there was an odd issue that we'll look into promptly.
Did you have plans for either of those? Or were you just exploring the possibilities?
As to other technical limitations, none come to mind.
William
On 8 June 2010 21:32, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
I think it's configured per namespace, so one technically could use it for talk pages, but I believe the configuration we're planning for Wikipedia is just main space. Naturally, if the community clamored to apply it elsewhere, it wouldn't be hard to change. We'd want to think through the implications first, though, as we've been focused on articles.
I believe redirects should work, although when I went to double-check on the labs site there was an odd issue that we'll look into promptly.
Did you have plans for either of those? Or were you just exploring the possibilities?
No, I'm just wondering how quickly our 2,000 is going to get used up with people playing with userpages ;-)
Restricting it to mainspace while we get used to it is probably a sensible idea. I take it there'll be a central indicator somewhere of which pages (and how many) are protected, so we don't have to discover the limit by accident?
On 8 June 2010 21:34, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
No, I'm just wondering how quickly our 2,000 is going to get used up with people playing with userpages ;-)
A coupla years ago we had 200 protected pages and 800 semi-protected pages. What are current numbers?
(Having the protected pages go PC would be a big win for all, and I include [[Main Page]] in that. Just imagine being able to tell the press: "The Main Page isn't locked any more." Of course, the templates that make it up still will be ...)
- d.
On 8 June 2010 22:01, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 June 2010 21:34, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
No, I'm just wondering how quickly our 2,000 is going to get used up with people playing with userpages ;-)
A coupla years ago we had 200 protected pages and 800 semi-protected pages. What are current numbers?
(Having the protected pages go PC would be a big win for all, and I include [[Main Page]] in that. Just imagine being able to tell the press: "The Main Page isn't locked any more." Of course, the templates that make it up still will be ...)
- d.
Not going to happen. The main page being hard locked has the secondary benefit that admins shouldn't generally fiddle with it.
On 8 June 2010 17:01, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 June 2010 21:34, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
No, I'm just wondering how quickly our 2,000 is going to get used up with people playing with userpages ;-)
A coupla years ago we had 200 protected pages and 800 semi-protected pages. What are current numbers?
If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports you
will see some reports pertaining to long and indefinite protections. Some of them are protected redirects and salted deleted articles so are irrelevant, but it should give us some ideas of potential targets for this new technology.
Risker
On 8 June 2010 22:18, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports you will see some reports pertaining to long and indefinite protections. Some of them are protected redirects and salted deleted articles so are irrelevant, but it should give us some ideas of potential targets for this new technology.
About 4000, not bothering to look at saltings and redirects. So 2000 should be fine :-)
- d.
On 8 June 2010 22:01, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
A coupla years ago we had 200 protected pages and 800 semi-protected pages. What are current numbers?
In mainspace, "a few thousand", all told, I think. Probably over our 2k limit but not by an order of magnitude.
(Having the protected pages go PC would be a big win for all, and I include [[Main Page]] in that. Just imagine being able to tell the press: "The Main Page isn't locked any more." Of course, the templates that make it up still will be ...)
It'd be a bit gimmicky, no?
I can't imagine any change that'll not be immediately reverted or ignored. There's no actual content there; it's been edited nine times this year and four of those were errors-and-self-reverts.
Pending-changes won't be appropriate for all fully protected pages, either, of course. For example, it'll quite likely prove unmanageable with those which are protected due to sheer volume of editing - I can't be sure of this until it's implemented, of course, but I suspect on an individual basis we'd get overwhelmed quite a bit there trying to separate out the good diffs and the vandalism to get a stable improved version.
On the other hand, that's only a very small fraction of protections. I can't immediately think of any others - now we can selectively delete revisions easily, the cases where a page is locked to deal with a particularly focused abuser should lend themselves quite well to this.
On 06/08/2010 01:34 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
No, I'm just wondering how quickly our 2,000 is going to get used up with people playing with userpages ;-)
Restricting it to mainspace while we get used to it is probably a sensible idea. I take it there'll be a central indicator somewhere of which pages (and how many) are protected, so we don't have to discover the limit by accident?
Heh. Excellent question. You can see an example of the stats here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ValidationStatistics
The number you're looking for is "Using 'pending changes'".
You can also see a list of pages here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:StablePages
It is my hope that we'll keep ahead of any normal use by raising the limit as we see the system performing well under load.
William
On 06/08/2010 01:32 PM, William Pietri wrote:
On 06/08/2010 01:08 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
Are there any technical limits beyond a page count? Can we - for example - use it on talk pages or redirects?
I believe redirects should work, although when I went to double-check on the labs site there was an odd issue that we'll look into promptly.
Just wanted to follow up on this. The issue has been fixed and the fix tested. You should be able to put redirects under Pending Changes with no issues.
William
William Pietri wrote:
Our current plan is to raise that limit gradually as the performance implications become clear. If the community wants us to keep some hard limit, that's also doable.
With the utmost of respect, what you want to do here is to hew very close to the community agreed consensus, and only depart after a new consensus develops. Going purely on what the iron will stand in terms of load, is a surefire way to bring about much drama and wringing of hands, heads and what have you. Not a desirable thing at all.
I think I can encapsulate my advice in one sentence.
"Please don't plan controversial things."
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On 06/09/2010 12:39 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
William Pietri wrote:
Our current plan is to raise that limit gradually as the performance implications become clear. If the community wants us to keep some hard limit, that's also doable.
With the utmost of respect, what you want to do here is to hew very close to the community agreed consensus, and only depart after a new consensus develops. Going purely on what the iron will stand in terms of load, is a surefire way to bring about much drama and wringing of hands, heads and what have you. Not a desirable thing at all.
I think I can encapsulate my advice in one sentence.
"Please don't plan controversial things."
Hi! I'm not quite following this.
As far as I know, the community hasn't requested any numerical limits on the number of pages under Pending Changes. (If I got that wrong, please do point me to the page that says otherwise.) So to my mind, hewing closely to the agreed consensus would be to remove the limit as fast as we feel technically safe, allowing the community full reign to decide which pages get covered.
However, your notion that a limit would reduce the potential for drama is reasonable. If you'd like to wrangle consensus on the right numeric limit and the procedure for changing it, we'd be glad to keep the hard limit at the lower of the technical limit and the community limit.
William
On 9 June 2010 18:26, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
However, your notion that a limit would reduce the potential for drama is reasonable.
I'd agree with this. A limit - even if it's not technically needed - which can be altered after a bedding-in period is a great idea, and it's probably an improvement on the situation without one. If nothing else, it avoids us being overambitious, protecting more pages than we can scale to handle, and then discovering the hard way that there are horrible backlogs.
One suggestion I would make is to give a draft timetable - say, if we are happy with the technical conditions then on D+60 after rollout we'll increase it to 4,000, and allow other namespaces, and then increase it by a thousand pages a month until X point. Or something - if we have a timetable we can speed it up or slow it down as circumstances warrant, but otherwise it'll seem a bit arbitrary and a point of friction.
On 06/09/2010 02:30 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
I'd agree with this. A limit - even if it's not technically needed - which can be altered after a bedding-in period is a great idea, and it's probably an improvement on the situation without one. If nothing else, it avoids us being overambitious, protecting more pages than we can scale to handle, and then discovering the hard way that there are horrible backlogs.
One suggestion I would make is to give a draft timetable - say, if we are happy with the technical conditions then on D+60 after rollout we'll increase it to 4,000, and allow other namespaces, and then increase it by a thousand pages a month until X point. Or something - if we have a timetable we can speed it up or slow it down as circumstances warrant, but otherwise it'll seem a bit arbitrary and a point of friction.
That sounds great. Perhaps you could post something here?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Flagged_revision...
This need not be decided right at launch, so there's some time for discussion.
Thanks,
William
William
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:57 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 June 2010 20:55, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
d) it only applies BLP articles
Can you identify the origin of this belief? It's not correct. If there is some page still saying/implying this, we need to go fix it.
'Cos it was a big part of the plan in past iterations. It was news to me that isn't a current part of the plan, for instance. Though "limited to 2000" is useful. How many pages are currently protected or semi-protected, about 1000?
That kind of limitation was dropped from the community discussions fairly early on as morphed from the "More aggressive way of regulating articles" of flagged protection to the "Less disruptive way of protecting pages" of flagged protection.
Limiting it to BLP articles also has the problem that BLP issues very frequently extend out of BLP articles.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
That kind of limitation was dropped from the community discussions fairly early on as morphed from the "More aggressive way of regulating articles" of flagged protection to the "Less disruptive way of protecting pages" of flagged protection.
Limiting it to BLP articles also has the problem that BLP issues very frequently extend out of BLP articles.
On the gripping hand, limiting it to BLP's got a consensus. Trying it on for a wider array of articles is really asking for someone to punch you on the nose. Not recommended, but hey, you can do it if you feel proud enough.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On 9 June 2010 11:13, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On the gripping hand, limiting it to BLP's got a consensus. Trying it on for a wider array of articles is really asking for someone to punch you on the nose. Not recommended, but hey, you can do it if you feel proud enough.
I think that might be overstating it...
My understanding was that the most recently decided-on version (which is admittedly not precisely what we're getting) was *not* based on a consensus to restrict it to BLP articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revi...
BLPs are quoted a few times as examples, and they're certainly expected to be a large portion of the workload of this, but none of the recent plans have explicitly aimed for such a restriction.
On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 6:58 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 9 June 2010 11:13, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On the gripping hand, limiting it to BLP's got a consensus. Trying it on for a wider array of articles is really asking for someone to punch you on the nose. Not recommended, but hey, you can do it if you feel proud enough.
I think that might be overstating it...
My understanding was that the most recently decided-on version (which is admittedly not precisely what we're getting) was *not* based on a consensus to restrict it to BLP articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revi...
BLPs are quoted a few times as examples, and they're certainly expected to be a large portion of the workload of this, but none of the recent plans have explicitly aimed for such a restriction.
Exactly.
(Sorry for the nearly content free message, but this point is worth repeating.)
Time for everyone to go re-review the material. It's been a long time, enough that our memories have sure to suffered bit-rot. :)
On 8 June 2010 20:48, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
I like this a lot. I'd probably say, "goes live after a quick review" or "a quick double-check".
I like "double-check" - for all that we didn't want to use it as the *name* of the feature, it's an excellent rough description of what it involves.
Technically there are no restrictions about what pages it gets used on, but the number one concern I've heard mentioned is living people, and the biggest concern within that was currently protected pages, so I think that's perfectly fair for a soundbite. You could hedge a little if you wanted. E.g., "The trial's mainly starting with" or "mainly focused on".
How about "including some of..." - we have discussed them before, after all, so they'll probably end up claiming it anyway.
OK, what we have so far:
* Vandalism is bad. * Oxygen is good. * I like Jello.
I'm wondering if that'll get garbled in the editorial process.
( http://www.dilbert.com/fast/1993-03-16/ )
- d.