On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Andrew Garrett wrote:
I have some hopes that we could use change_tags for things other than AbuseFilter, but my understanding is that last time we tried this the community felt like the infrastructure was being "intruded on". Perhaps some modifications to the infrastructure could allow abuse filter and
other
tags to coexist in the ecosystem.
Uh, I think the community was mostly upset that you didn't provide any tag management interface. At all.
It's been a while, but the last time I looked, there was no way to add tags, remove tags, or modify tags. I think there are still a number of revisions on the English Wikipedia that have been tagged by the AbuseFilter extension with text like "potentially libelous addition" or other incendiary comments of that nature, with no means of removal for false positives.
I don't know if it was intentional (and I imagine it wasn't), but your reply about the community's feelings toward whatever infrastructure you're referring to reads like a bit of a slap in the face. The scare quotes didn't help.
The tagging system was poorly implemented. That's why it's been under-utilized.
I caught Max online to talk about this.
I want to clarify that I was talking specifically about the possibility of using the AbuseFilter tagging interface in other extensions. For example, to tag changes made using particular tools or features, rather than being upset that the community had not used the tagging interface as much as I might have hoped. There are several technical shortcomings which make other uses of change tagging likely to "intrude" (scare quotes because I'm not sure that I have the right word) on the current community use of the tagging feature. Among them are my failure to secure namespacing for change tags, and the fact that tags are displayed in some way or other after items in logs unconditionally. The lack of a tag management interface is one, but it's a work-intensive problem that requires design work and does not address the idea of using tags in other software contexts – though it does open up new (and possibly helpful) uses of change tagging to the community as well as allowing some cleanup work to take place.
I also want to make sure that I reinforce my qualification on the comment that the community felt that change tagging was being "intruded upon". It's something that I heard somewhere and isn't intended to mean that we need to "work on" the community. I'm intending to say that some further work is needed to genericise the feature so that Abuse Filter and other tagging infrastructure can coexist – my point about the community objecting wasn't intended to imply that these hypothetical/mythological objectors were being unreasonable.
Hope this makes more sense to you than it does to me. :-)
—Andrew