2008/5/7 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
Erik Moeller wrote:
In a nutshell, FlaggedRevs makes it possible to assign quality tags to individual article revisions, and to alter default views based on the available tags.
Aka hacked up a nice script that shows how many pages have been "sighted" (basic vandalism check) on the German Wikipedia: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=english
Given that FlaggedRevs has just been live for a day or so, a review rate of 4.41% is quite impressive!
Wait now. When FlaggedRevs was first mentioned, the press started to announce that censorship was being planned for Wikipedia. This was countered with the explanation that flagging was a more open regime than page locking. We no longer have to lock pages on controversial topics, because we can allow free editing as long as the non-logged-in majority gets to see the flagged/approved version.
Is it really "impressive" to have this new "soft locking" mechanism applied to a large number of pages? Wouldn't it be better to show how few pages were in need of this protection? And at the same time, to mention how many previously locked pages have now been unlocked in the name of increased openness?
No, I don't think so. Having a flag on a page is just a way of saying "this version is ok". Would it not be much better to have a version that is 'ok' for ALL pages rather than just the controversial ones? Would it really be a good thing to say "Only these few pages have versions that are okay, we have no idea about the others, but we see no reason to think they're not okay?"