On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Bart <banaticus(a)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.