On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/8 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
I think Lars calls FlaggedRevs "soft locking" and doesn't want to apply it on a large scale.
IMHO FlaggedRevs are much different from protection/locking. The purpose of FlaggedRevs is to present the uninitiated audience with a vandalism-free Wikipedia. Applying FlaggedRevs to only a few pages will not achieve that.
I think Lars' worry is (partly) a matter of update rates leading to locking-through-inertia.
Yes, we can purge through all existing pages and set a flag on them - indeed, it's an excellent opportunity to do so, and it means that hopefully all pages will get eyeballed to make them clean.
But! What happens next? If I go off and update a short article (one which no-one has watchlisted, etc) on de.wp, what mechanism is in place to flag *that* revision? Is it possible that on non-high-traffic pages, an "old" revision could remain the newest flagged one for weeks, months, despite having been superceded?
I can see how this would have the effect of soft-locking - I'd really like to know how we plan to get round it.
A flagged page that is edited by a "trusted" user (that is, one who can flag pages) is flagged by default. Given the (potentially) huge number of such users, many pages will have flags updated as a by-product of normal editing.
Automatically generated reports of all pages with the most recent edit "unflagged", sorted by age, perhaps? This'd allow the permitted users to knock off a few each a day, keep it churning over. The sort of thing that would appeal to inveterate RC patrollers ;-)
There are a number of special pages for these purposes. There's one that lists pages with no flagged version; you can even filter by category! I think I saw a "sort-by-oldest-flag" page as well.
Of course, the potential for views on this would increase exponentially once such info is available through the API. Maybe I should write a toolserver interface until then. Are the respective tables/fields replicated to the toolserver?
Magnus