2009/3/1 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
What's the holdup in the flagged revisions trial on en:wp?
In general, there's a defined process for FlaggedRevs configurations, which I laid out here when we first made this feature available:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-June/043691.html
This is the process through which those requests have been handled so far, and I would hope that once there's a clear en.wp request, we'll have a tracking bug associated with it. That said, we've also had separate conversations with Jimmy about the next steps in the process, and he's committed to formulating a revised proposal for en.wp which will hopefully be able to garner more support than the original one. A WMF intervention is possible, but it does not currently appear to be necessary.
The developers have been properly holding off implementation of the extension. It's not their job to tell the en.wp community what to do.
I will note that even when we have a clear request, we might not immediately implement the feature, for several reasons:
1) We need to ensure that it can run at the scale of en.wp. We'll continue to do what we can to anticipate possible performance bottlenecks in advance, but we may also discover new ones in an actual production roll-out.
2) The UI workflow has been heavily optimized for a de.wp style configuration. If the requested en.wp configuration is significantly different from the de.wp scenario, we may still want to make improvements to it in order to better support whatever workflow is the most common. So, for example, if a "Flagged Protection" type approach becomes the preferred solution for en.wp, we may decide to focus some attention to better integrate FlaggedRevs with other protection tools.
It's more important, IMO, to get this right than to just hastily roll out something that will then lead to opposition of the form "FlaggedRevs is horrible, let's get rid of it". We won't be able to make it perfect, but if we know the primary use cases in advance, we can certainly make changes to accommodate them.
Erik