The autoreview feature for FlaggedRevs does not work in the Hungarian
Wikipedia because of a configuration problem with a group name. This
causes a lot of extra work for the patrollers, and a lot of extra
waiting for everyone else for their edits to appear.
It has been about forty days since I filed a bug about this; in the
meantime, I asked twice for help on wikitech-l (not to mention the
several personal emails and IRC messages I and other Hungarian editors
sent). After my first wikitech-l mail, there was a short and
unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem without actually understanding
what we asked for; before and after, in those seven weeks, nothing
happened.
This is very disappointing. To fix the bug, one would need to replace
all occurrences of 'confirmed' with 'trusted' in the huwiki flagrev
config file - that takes about 20 seconds. If one wanted to be
thorough about it and move users from the old group to the new, one
would need to construct an appropriate SQL query - maybe 5 more
minutes. There are about a hundred patrollers on hu.wikipedia
(including admins). If we suppose they only have to work one extra
minute a day each (a very unrealistic lower estimation), that adds up
to about sixty hours. Which is about a thousand times twenty seconds.
Is staff time really a thousand times more valuable than volunteer
time, so that no one can be bothered to make this trivial fix, even if
many hours of other people's time could be spared? I'm aware it is
summer, and Wikimania is going on, and everyone has a lot on their
hands, but even so I can't believe none of the people with shell
access can find a minute to make the fix.
Letting the time of the most active community members go to waste like
this is not only very discouraging them, and not only does it
undermine their trust in the revision flagging system (which proved to
be a very valuable anti-vandalism tool, but it was always hard to get
enough people involved), it also creates a rift between WMF and the
local community. People perceive that the foundation does not respect
their volunteer work at all, and it is only quick when it is creating
problems (their previous contact with WMF was when someone shot down
the statistics script that ran with community consensus, without as
much as a question or comment), and not when it should be solving
them.
If you want to broaden participation and involve more people into
meta-projects, start with actually caring about issues like these. And
now please, please find someone to finally fix bug 19885.