On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Bart banaticus@gmail.com wrote:
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
[snip]
Sorry to be curt, but why do people who have a weak understanding of the functionality available feel so compelled to make comments like this?
The software supports automatically preserving the standing flagging (or some portion of it) when users with the authority to set those flags make edits. This eliminates the inherit doubling.
The flagging communicates to users that a revision has been reviewed to some degree by an established user. This should allow review resources to applied more effectively rather than having 100 people review every change to a popular article while changes to less popular articles end up insufficiently reviewed.
Furthermore, the existence of flagged versions in the history means that when a series of unflagged revisions are made they can be reviewed in a single action by viewing the diff against the the single most recent 'known-probably-good' flagged revision. Without these points in the history every single edit must be individually reviewed.
The exact change in workload isn't clear: If there is an increase in workload then it would come from an increase from performing a review of changes by less-established users (those unable to set the flags) which previously went completely without review. I hope that there isn't currently enough completely unreviewed material that it would offset the time saving improvements of collaborative review and known-good comparison points.
I'm sure that it is possible to find worthwhile criticisms of the flagging functionality (or the particular configuration requested by EnWP), but many people have worked very hard on this functionality and many of most obvious possible problems have been addressed. To produce an effective criticism you're going to need to spend a decent amount of time researching, reading discussion history, trying the software, etc. Maybe if you do you'll find that the functionality isn't as frightening as you feared and hopefully you'll find a new possible problem which can actually be addressed without rejecting this attempt at forward progress.