Jake Wartenberg wrote:

As a side note, what exactly is holding up implementation of this on enwiki?

That's an excellent question, and one I'm hopefully getting close to answering. As background, Erik recently brought me on for a few hours a week to move things along.

Part of the problem is definitely the size and complexity of the proposed feature set. There are also a number of outstanding questions about the best user interface, including issues with naming, clarity of the conceptual model, ease of use, and impact on various audiences, especially including readers. Plus, the extension is now in production use on 24 WMF projects, with nearly as many different configurations.

Those are all solvable problems, but resource constraints have kept us from progressing as fast as we'd like. Happily, the usability folks -- especially Howie Fung -- have had a little time to lend a hand with the UI issues, and I think we'll shortly have a proposal for something we can get into production soon. That would include enough measurement that we can see what the impact is, and provide for quick follow-ups if there are issues with the first release.

Once I have more solid info, I'll definitely mention it here. But in the meantime, the labs site being down is definitely holding us up some, so I'd love to find out how I can fix that.

Thanks,

William

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

I'm not bagging flagged revs...it just needs a lot more usability work. The name "flagged revs" for a start...

Steve

As per the discussions on en.wiki, I believe we [en.wikipedia] will be calling Flagged Protection since that is how it is meant to be implemented for us based on community consensus and that is what it has been formally called during the numerous voting processes.

-Peachey

Steve Bennett wrote:

Hmm, maybe it's time big complicated intrusive features like this were designed by BA*, rather than by committee.

I think it's possible to get the best of both worlds. The community has a lot of expertise in what's going on, what they need, and what the risks are. But professional software designers have a much bigger library of potential solutions, plus a variety of skills and hard-won experience. Not just in designing the software, but planning the rollout, managing the risks, and working with developers.

Most software is either internal business software, where users are obliged to put up with almost anything, or consumer-oriented, where users are mostly uninvolved and fickle. The product management methods in either of those spaces probably wouldn't work well here: Wikipedians, as volunteers, can't be ordered around. They also aren't just consumers; they're a community, one that wants to engage deeply. But I think we can take tools from both and figure out something that works here.

Are there historical examples of WMF development projects that have gone particularly well? I'd love to look at them in detail.

William

Steve Bennett wrote:

I have to admit, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection does an admirable job of explaining it (skip the text, just read the tables),

Well, I find misleading the text

Can edit; a new edit is visible immediately if the previous version is already confirmed

since it isn't clear that such edit is automatically confirmed, and so no manual confirmation is needed for several of them.

It's clear from the text above, but not so much from just looking at the table

that is, if the latest version of a page is confirmed, a new revision by an autoconfirmed user is automatically confirmed