On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 3:24 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)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
--
Andrew Garrett
Wikimedia Foundation
agarrett(a)wikimedia.org