On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: de.wp community held a straw poll and it approved Flaggedrevs in the current setting. You can find figures about the current status of flagging at http://toolserver.org/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=english&action=ov…

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] [snip] Follow the link! http://toolserver.org/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=english&action=ov…

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: I agreed that they would be very informative. (Though you can go try to read the discussions...) But they can't determine whether it would work elsewhere. Elsewhere is not German Wikipedia. The only way to *determine* is to try it. I think the expirence on deWP will be most informative about what sorts of challenges are likely.

Nathan wrote: Hello Nathan, I tried to forward your question to the german mailing-list to ask an expert for the answer. But for some reason I don't understand my forward didn't come through. So here my answer. Philipp Birken, who is a member on the board of the German Chapter and who was the organizer of the development of teh stable versions made a very detailed and interesting talk on the Wikimania in Alexandria to this topic. The talk vastly changed my opinion on the stable versions (maybe you know during my election to the board I said I was still very reserved to the stable versions thing). Philipps conclusion was that he would recommend every big language version (that is with article counts more than 100,000) use the stable versions. To my personal opinion I think stable version is especially useful for vandal battling. If you have say 80% of your articles checked, you can see very easily which article was changed in the last night and not checked again. Especially useful is this because you are even aware of the changes that are made on articles which no one had put it on his watchlist. With a few hundred enthusiastic voluntiers (I have no doubt that the english Wikipedia has them) this is a managable task. Sometimes there were lags on the checking. For example during the Wikimania the unchecked articles numbre on the German Wikipedia increased to a few thousand. After the Wikimania the german voluntiers started a concentrated check action to reduce that number back to a managable size. There are some experiments and talks and votes on the German Wikipedia on how the stable version should be showed to the user: Show the checked version to all users if they request an article with a hint to not checked version, show the checked version to IP-user and new user with a hint to not checked version, ans show the actual version to users with check right. Show actual version to all users with a hint to checked version and so on. I personally would always use the actual user, but on the other hand, I am not a user who ONLY search for information and don't know the mechanisms. And the votes thus far made on German Wikipedia are also only from editors with vote right. So I cannot say how an only read user see this. Academic tests on this would be interesting but as far as I know there is no such tests planned until now. On the other hand, with one exception until now I had also not heard any negative complaints about this anywhere. That one exception is on the forum of the c't magazine and I think the user is generally unhappy with the rigid quality rules on the German Wikipedia. As far as I know the more advanced function of the stable version, the proofed version (that is, marked as proofed by an expert) is not implemented on the de-wp until now. So from my view it is a good tool for vandal battling but it still doesn't fulfill the function it is thought of: to give a random user a proofed, qualitatively garanteed article. Beside ther de-wp there are at least two other projects that use the checked version. One is ru-wp. I didn't see any reports of the practice there, would be interesting too. Ting

Thanks Yaroslav for the quick report. Just what I hoped :-) Ting Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:

Everything is fully correct, thanks. (I forgot to mention that we also flag images). Cheers Yaroslav

I have just checked, it is being fully displayed, I could not find any way to figure it is unflagged other than going to the image page. Having said that, most of our images are on Commons and can not be flagged anyway. Cheers Yaroslav

I am not sure about de.wp, but in ru.wp bots have a passive review access, meaning if a bot edits a flagged version it stays flagged. Otherwise, nothing happens. Cheers Yaroslav