Flagged Revisions too intrusive - Wikiquality-l

23 Sep 2007

Hi there,

I'm a writer from the German Wikipedia, but not usually concerned with 
politics or administration, so forgive me if I understood something 
incorrectly. But to me it seems that there is no way to not use this 
feature - it seems more like a new policy.

There are communities in Wikipedia around articles that belong together 
thematically. Those communities watch over them, but the articles are 
fairly complete, at least as far as the current community is concerned. 
Most edits, excepting vandalism, are miniscule. If such a community now 
decides it does not want to flag "its" articles, because they'd rather 
work under the current rules, then they should be allowed to do so.

As it is planned, the feature is simply too intrusive. Once an article 
is flagged as "sighted", there is no way back. It effectively forces the 
community to keep on flagging, because otherwise a years-old version, 
that may even have been flagged erroneously, would be shown to anonymous 
readers instead of the current one.

I know many authors in the German Wikipedia, who see this issue in a 
similar light: the whole editing process is becoming more complex, but 
we are not getting any new writers for our article-communities and the 
existing writers aren't getting any smarter because of flagging. Most of 
us are unpolitical and even agnostic of most software features and/or 
administrative processes - we just want to write. So don't shove this 
feature down our throats. I think it is an interesting idea and may well 
work, but it should be in effect for article-communities that want it 
and can handle it, but others should be allowed to take a more 
conservative approach.

Therefore I think we need a way to unflag revisions or change the 
"anonymous users don't see the current version if unflagged" rule for 
certain pages.

Ulrich