--- On Mon, 10/12/09, Cecil <cecilatwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Cecil <cecilatwp(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [Wikisource-l] Proofreading
To: wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Monday, October 12, 2009, 7:42 AM
I think German Wikisource has a rather high
quality standard compared to a lot of other Wikisource
projects. There are several projects which don't do
proofread at all or request scans. That is where we should
start to unify the Wikisources.
German Wikisource is also one of the project which have the
longest time experience with PR. In all this time we never
had problems with IPs proofreading. The community is small
and it's usually the same few people. Our contributions
by IPs are overviewable (check Latest Changes for it) and
AFAIK we never had miss-use by IPs. That's why I have
problems to understand why a plugin gets developed in a way
that is more secure but less user-friendly when there never
were problems with security but some with user-friendlyness
(e.g. currently you should not be colour-blind if you want
to change the status after proofreading because there is no
description of the radio-buttons; I don't consider
having to create a special monobook as user-friendly,
especially considering that not everybody is able to do that
just like that).
Next thing: if somebody wants to cheat he will cheat.
Switching of IPs does not bring anything since there is
sockpuppeting. It actually causes the opposite. While we can
see the IP-adresses and can check if they are from the same
range, we can't do the same with accounts. Only
checkuser can do that and German data privacy law is rather
rigorous when it comes to that kind of activity. It is not
at all like on Commons (the only other project where I have
CU-experience), where you have a suspicion and ask a CU to
check it. On German projects (and that is something we
can't change) the hurdle is much higher. For those who
speak German, you could check the CU-request-page at German
Wikipedia to see what kind of information collection is
necessary to get a CU ([
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checkuser/Anfragen]).
So actually the chance to detect a cheater is now much lower
than before.
Of course anyone can cheat using two usernames instead of IPs. The difference is that
when the cheating is discovered somewhere (even if it is three years later) we can easily
check ALL the contributions of the usernames involved and take care of the issue. If
cheating were done with a dynamic IP it would much less likely to be able to do a through
review and catch all the problems.
To the suggestion of 'searching a new developer': I
don't know how much quality ThomasV produces in his code
(comments, format, speaking names for variables/...; bugs
are normal, but the amount of bugs in each release is not a
good sign), but one thing I know from several years
experience: taking over the code of somebody else is no fun
at all. Often enough I ended up rewriting the whole code.
Getting a second developer to work on the same plugin is a
bad idea from my point of view as a developer, even if it is
in a second branch (to prevent conflicts). It usually takes
months until the first working output gets generated (one
that does not cause troubles at zig other places, because
you had not yet had the overview and did not know that
changing something at this place will cause consequenses in
a totally different area). Sorry, but I suppose that
Birgitte does not know what developing a working software
(not speedily hacking some emergency-tool) includes, because
we are having the problem now and not in half a year (just a
estimate as I have not seen the sourcecode of PR2).
I don't think it would be trivial to get another developer. I just think it would be
easier to do that than to convince ThomasV to do you all a favor given what you all are
saying about him. Also you don't seem like you want to work with ThomasV at all. So
it seems to me things would be better for all involved if you work with someone else.
And we are stuck with PR2. It IS a good idea, and it is
more encouraging for those who do the proofreading, because
they can do one page now and then later another without a
huge text complex. So in the last few years German
Wikisource has transfered a majority of its projects to this
solution (especially the large ones). Thus switching off the
PR2-extension is not an option, since it would break most of
our projects and converting them back would probably take
several man-months (even with the help of bots). We
don't want to get rid of PR2, we just want to be able
for everybody to use it, not discriminating a few users who
for whatever reason prefer to work without an account. They
are as valuable to the German community as registered ones.
OK I can understand that. I wasn't sure how far along you were with the extension.
Perhaps you can ask brion to put de.WS back on the older version of MediaWiki until you
manage to patch the last update to do what you like.
Birgitte SB