On 9/24/07, Kurt Jansson kurt.jansson@wikimedia.de wrote:
If it ever takes more then 10 minutes to flag an article as "sighted" we have a problem. And that would not be a problem of the sighted version feature, it would be a problem of us not having enough people patrolling the recent changes. A lag of edits to be sighted would just be the symptom.
Even though I agree with Ulrich that it is wiser to trial something like this as an on/off switch on selected pages (yeah yeah, I don't mind repeating myself), I am convinced that it will be possible to improve the scalability of the feature quite massively. There are quite a few things we aren't doing yet, including
- mass review (showing a slice of 20 suspicious diffs on a page and asking a person to sight them for vandalism) - applying a set of heuristics to rate the "supciousness" of an edit in the same way spam filters do, including constant filter improvement through Bayesian algorithms - making it easier to authenticate from other sites (this is post Single User Login!), and using that authentication information for the "suspiciousness rating". For example, someone who can authenticate as a University Professor is probably more trustworthy than a TOR user.
From an editor's point of view, it would even be possible to send an
instant notification once an edit has been approved. Which, in some ways, is even cooler than making the edit yourself, especially if it happens within seconds. If reviewers don't mind being identified, we could even allow immediate real-time interaction via chat.
My vision is that eventually, editors will have access to a "master control center" for reviewing changes they are interested in. This would integrate some of the real-time tools dedicated vandal fighters are already using and plenty of new mechanisms.
While all of this is _hard_, it's not inconceivable. A talented small group of developers with enough funding for a year or two could pull it off.
Kurt, now that things are moving forward on the initial implementation, perhaps the German chapter could pursue some funding for further development in this area, e.g. through the EU? It will probably take at least until early 2008 for the Foundation to become capable to execute such things in a timely fashion, esp. now that we also have to relocate.