On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip] I'm concerned that the simplified graphical explanation of the process fosters the kind of misunderstanding that we saw in the first slashdot threads about flagged revision... particularly the mistaken belief that the process is synchronous. People outside of the active editing community have frequently raised the same concerns on their exposure to the idea of flagged revisions. Common ones I've seen "Won't people simply reject changes so they can make their own edits?" "Who is going to bother to merge all the unreviewed changes on a busy article, they're going to lose a lot of contributions!" None of these concerns really apply to the actual implementation because it's the default display of the articles which is controlled, not the ability to edit. There is still a single chain of history and the decision to display an article happens totally asynchronously with the editing. The illustration still fosters the notion of some overseeing gatekeeper on an article expressing editorial control— which is not the expected behaviour of the system, nor a desired behaviour, nor something we would even have the resources to do if it were desirable. In particular there is no per-revision analysis mandated by our system: Many edits will happen, then someone with the right permissions will look at a delta from then-to-now and decide that nothing is terrible in the current version and make it the displayed version. It's possible that there were terrible intermediate versions, but it's not relevant. I have created a poster suitable for distribution to journalists http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/flagged_protection.png (Though the lack of clarity in the ultimate naming has made it very difficult to finalize it. If anyone wants it I can share SVG/PDF versions of it).