Help us Test Stable Versions! - Wikitech-l

21 Mar 2008


      Please translate this announcement into other languages and forward it
to other mailing lists and village pumps. (The translators list has
already been notified and will help with this process.)
The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany have collaborated, with
financial support from Wikimedia France, to support development of a
new extension to our software
which makes it possible to flag versions of wiki articles as having
reached a certain quality. This new toolset could mark the beginning
of a new era for Wikipedia and its sister projects, giving readers
more transparency than ever about the quality of a given article. A
special note of thanks to Aaron Schulz, who has developed much of the
functionality as a volunteer -- we would not be where we are today
without him. The ongoing support and patience of Philipp Birken from
the German chapter was also critical.
Before this functionality will be enabled on any Wikimedia project, it
needs to be tested thoroughly for usability, bugs, security and
performance. Test wikis have been set up in English and German
(because the German Wikimedia community has been driving the
development of this functionality from the beginning).
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/
http://de.labs.wikimedia.org/
These wikis contain a copy of the Wikibooks database. This copy is
completely separate from the "real" Wikibooks, so do not worry about
destroying anything of value. Please follow the instructions on the
Main Pages to participate. If you do not speak English or German, we
encourage you right now to
- set up test wikis independently using the open source extension
available from http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs ,
or
- change the user interface preference, and create pages in the
English test wiki in your language.
This is due to our limited capacity to set up additional wikis. If you
feel you really, absolutely, strongly need a test wiki in your
language, please file a request through:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
Wikimedia communities will also have to decide what kind of
configuration to use for their project. Key questions to answer
include:
- What quality attributes should there be?
- Who should be permitted to flag changes as having been reviewed for
vandalism, or for other quality attributes?
- Should the default view for unregistered users change to the "stable
version" on all pages, some pages, or no pages?
The German Wikimedia community has implemented a particular
long-standing community proposal and will probably go live the soonest
with this configuration; other communities will still have to develop
consensus.
== What's next? ==
The test will run at least until April 10, 2008 before the extension
is implemented live on any wiki. This is to allow any serious problems
to be surfaced by the community. If there are no critical open issues
as of April 10, any language/project community will be permitted to
file a request through https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ to activate the
extension. This request will have to point to pages in the project
indicating a consensus to move forward. Detailed instructions to do so
will be posted on the test wikis.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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