I don't know about those flagged revisions. After a while, it would basically mean that every edit and page view would be doubled. For most people, they'd have to double edit to flag their revision as the "latest and greatest" (lag) edit. In an edit war, as people revert the other persons' edit, they'd again flag their reversion as the lag edit. When people look at a page, of course they're going to want to see the lag version, so they'll constantly be flipping to see it -- unless there's something that they want to change and then they're going to have to pull up an edit difference to see what the changes are that have gone through but not been flagged as the lag version so that they know whether or not the change has already been fixed by someone.
I think such a system might work well on a smaller wiki, but as a wiki grows bigger and bigger, flagged revisions start to mean less and less just as they become more and more unwieldly.
I think a better solution would be to upgrade Huggle/Twinkle. As it now stands, the main antivandal programs are... somewhat stodgy. When you have a bunch of people all using them at once, you start to run into edit conflicts. Different people will be trying to revert the same page at the same time. But you know how you can set a page as "patrolled" in the "new revisions" section? Perhaps there should be a way to set that on Huggle/Twinkle, but for multiple users. There could be a flag that flips when there are more than X number of users actively running through Huggle/Twinkle. If the number of users is greater than X, then revisions are actually sent out to multiple people at once. This seems somewhat contradictory at first, the idea that you'll save time/resources and cover more pages if you have more people working on the same page, but it wouldn't revert as soon as you hit revert. It would just set the flag on that page and serve up the next page -- if a majority of reviewers reverts it, the vandalism is reverted and the vandal is warned.
If the number of users is lower than X, then of course each person would instantly revert a page when they revert. But I spend a lot of time waiting for Huggle to revert a page and warn a user. This may not be the case for everyone, but I read very quickly. I read the last Harry Potter book in like a couple of hours, no joking. When I use Huggle, I spend the majority of my time waiting for Huggle to revert a page and warn a user (well, other than using Google to find other sites to check on factual accuracy, but that's another story).
I just feel that the amount of edit conflicts while using Huggle and the amount that the same set of pages is looked over by the same set of people, all of whom are trying to individually revert, is just too much. There's far too much wasted time, in my opinion, because Huggle and Twinkle, although great, are just slightly inadequate to keep up with how big Wikepdia has become. It's so huge that it's impossible for one person to read it all, since it'd take a few years of continuous reading and it's growing faster than the fastest reader could read.
I just think that flagged revisions will open up a can of worms and just hit the servers more than they're already being hit. This may work on the German Wikipedia, but the English Wikipedia is almost seven times bigger than the German one and I do believe en is growing much faster than de -- there are just far more users doing "stuff" on the English Wikipedia. 2009/5/19 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org
Quick update:
- Yes, we do plan to roll out an English Wikipedia test setup for
Flagged Revs.
- There's not yet a fixed schedule for it, but I'd like to see it up and
running in production before Wikimania. :) [August]
- Right now we're running round tidying up general things, getting the
1.15 release set up, and prepping to get our live sites updated to development trunk -- nice things are afoot like a total upgrade to the preferences backend which Werdna has done, yay!
- As we get back up to speed, we'll want to coordinate w/ Aaron to
confirm that we've got a configuration planned and that it'll look good, and get that test config on en.labs.wikimedia.org and test.wikipedia for a while before we roll it to en.wikipedia.
I'd also like to see folks ponder a bit on the final terminology for things -- we'd also like to roll out the Drafts extension (for saving your in-progress edit page in the background so you can return to it if you accidentally close it or your browser crashes), but Flagged Revs also uses the 'draft' terminology sometimes. We want to make sure we're not going to be looking too confusing having both of those things in the system.
-- brion
El 5/12/09 5:20 PM, private musings escribió:
Hi all,
The 'flagged revisions' bug ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18244 ) - has, by my
reading
been 'reopened' for 2 weeks now. Being as this is a reasonably big deal
in
the wiki scheme of things, I presume it's possible that matters are being discussed, or otherwise moved forward in some way, behind the scenes, but
at
this point, I thought it was probably worth making sure that this hasn't just been sort of forgotten.
I think the enabling of flagged revisions on the english wikipedia is a
very
important, positive step for the project, and hope it might be acted upon
in
reasonably good order as a high priority.
Apologies if such prodding is not a great fit on this list - don't mean
to
bug anyone (geddit?) ;-)
cheers,
Peter, PM.
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 3:55 PM, private musings<thepmaccount@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
It seems to me that there's been sterling work on the 'flagged
revisions'
front - with the bulk of the credit due to User:Cenarium over on en, and
the
various folk working away over there.
With that in mind, could I please encourage a dev.s attention to;
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18244
Hopefully we can enable the extension as soon as possible :-)
best,
Peter, PM.
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