2009/3/2 Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com:

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 7:16 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

What's the holdup in the flagged revisions trial on en:wp?

Is there a bug?

Is that the actual requirement for it to happen? (Are you stating this authoritatively, or as a hypothesis? I'm looking for the authoritative answer.)

- d.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com wrote:

The developers do not normally do configuration changes without a bug (even trivial ones, which this one certainly isn't...).  They're used to document the request, requester, to make sure that the change was authorized by the community, to give a clear "to-do list"... etc.  I don't state this "authoritatively", but I would be surprised if they did something without a bug.

(Effe thinks I'm being mean to the devs here, I'm not, btw. :-) I think the bugzilla is very useful for the things I outlined above and it is not unrealistic to request a bug before a change.)

2009/3/2 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com wrote:

...

Is there a bug?

More significantly, is there evidence of community consensus?

There was a poll which came out about 59%:41% in favour, then Jimbo loudly and publicly requested that it be switched on. There's been a ton of publicity about it, and I find it frankly unbelievable it hasn't been mentioned even in passing in the WMF office. So if it's been sitting there for weeks so a dev can say "ah, but you didn't tick this box and file form 10-QF, so sorry" then that would be a marvellous illustration of passive sabotage, but not actually being helpful.

So, can anyone answer authoritatively?

- d.

2009/3/2 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:

At issue is that there are always _urgent_ things that need to be done that prevent the _ordinary_ requests from being done. There is no rea; urgency for enabling flagged revisions, not more so then for the creation of the Pontic Wikipedia. So please wait in line.

Are you speaking authoritatively, or just adding noise?

-d .

2009/3/2 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:

As a member of the language committee I can authoritatively state that the

I meant concerning procedures to actually get things to happen. Thanks for your help.

- d.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 8:49 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, As a member of the language committee I can authoritatively state that the request for a Pontic Wikipedia has been waiting for 60 days. The request fro a Finnish Wikiversity has been waiting for 50 days. I have talked with Brion about this at Fosdem, and he acknowledged that operational issues like this do not get the attention that they deserve.

I believe the "stable versions" were originally proposed on enwiki 1,192 days ago in Nov. 2005 (unless there's another page even older than the one I found). It's assumed several shapes and sizes since then but has never disappeared.

I know nobody can agree on what settings should ultimately be used, but this is a trivial excuse not to pick something reasonable to use on a trial basis.

If everyone will shut the hell up about how long unflagged edits must be left unattended before they "expire" or flag themselves, or whether or not there is an absolute way to prevent it from being used for purposes other than special high-intensity BLP enforcements, or whether semi-protection should be used in concert with this... for just one bloody second maybe we could get just agree "yes, most of us would like a trial run for now, we'll worry about the rest later".

But no, last I checked people were stonewalling each other over which of 15 different ***TRIAL scenarios*** would be the best: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions/Trial/Proposed...

I don't suppose these clowns work in retail? Ah yes ma'am, paper or plastic, smoking or non-smoking, courtesy fold or no courtesy fold, window or aisle, fries or onion rings with that, mustard or mayo... no, wait I meant catsup...

Of course when dealing with people like this I think most of us have a breaking point where we say "I don't fucking know, just pick something and surprise me".

—C.W.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Everything is said and done for the Pontic Wikipedia for quite some time. Reading your reply, more will be said and done before Flagged Revisions will be implemented. Sad really.

Hoi polloi, First of all I should probably apologise for my previous post. I don't regret any of the things I said per se, only that I wasn't quite sober enough at the moment to notice I was addressing wikitech-l, not wikien-l. Had I been more aware of the audience I would have phrased things a bit differently, so sorry about that, devs.

However I will continue to address my colleagues on the English Wikipedia (civilly I hope) as I know many of them are reading this as well.

I've read many of the polls and have concluded we might have done better to take a more iterative approach to decision-making.

Simple questions, one at a time, starting with "should flaggedrevs be enabled in any way, shape, or form". Yes, there would have still been numerous emphatic nay-votes (including sitting arbitrators who would still decry flaggedrevs as "the end of Wikipedia" no matter what parameters are used), but there wouldn't be people opposing on the basis that they don't like a specific proposed configuration, because there would be no specific proposed configuration.

Of course there would still be those pesky mu votes from people who support the general idea but oppose because they think they need a specific proposed configuration first. However I trust the developers have chosen a reasonable middle-ground default settings for all the important variables. Once we had it turned on, we might have found some or several screws that needed tightening or loosening. We would have gotten a consensus to change anything that needed to be changed. And yes, we'd gotten a consensus that to turn it all off and forget about it, we could have done that too.

This may seem overly bureaucratic and I know it would be slow progress, but it would be measurable progress. We'd have had something to show for it every step of the way. Right now we have neither of these things.

I don't see the point in explicitly identifying anything as a "trial". Many of us don't like to like to think in these terms but everything we do, both here and in real life, is essentially done on a trial (and error) basis. Right now each one of us is either trying something new, or doing whatever has worked best so far, or repeating the same mistakes made previously.

Maybe it's too late ask anyone to take a leap of faith right now, but it might be something to consider "in the next iteration" (to quote a dear friend of mine). Sooner or later things are gonna change, I can feel it.

Maybe there will be another incident of the Seigenthaler calibre that changes everyone's perspective on this. Or maybe the community will change itself enough (consider David Gerard's aphorisms about tenure in online communities) to consider this more open-mindedly, rather than digging their heels into whatever material paves Wikipedia's surface at any given time (or more tacitly, accepting the status quo as a destination rather than the forgettable stepping stone that it is).

Maybe somebody will develop of a completely different software extension which facilitates quality control from a yet unforeseen angle that would make flaggedrevs obsolete whether we're using it or not. Maybe the community will be willing to actually discover whether or not it works rather than waving their hands in dissent toward any new idea proffered.

Or maybe there will just be a combination of little things which slowly but surely convince us that our current strategy isn't working well enough, that it's time to open up some windows, to try something different only because there is little left to lose. Maybe Jimbo will go Neville Flynn on us.

Until then we can only hope.

—C.W.

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 12:17 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

2009/3/2 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:

...

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com wrote:

...

...

Is there a bug?

...

More significantly, is there evidence of community consensus?

There was a poll which came out about 59%:41% in favour, then Jimbo loudly and publicly requested that it be switched on. There's been a ton of publicity about it, and I find it frankly unbelievable it hasn't been mentioned even in passing in the WMF office. So if it's been sitting there for weeks so a dev can say "ah, but you didn't tick this box and file form 10-QF, so sorry" then that would be a marvellous illustration of passive sabotage, but not actually being helpful.

So, can anyone answer authoritatively?

It isn't clear that the configuration change will be made. Jimmy has very little authority (if any) over technical matters, other than that of a board member, and 59% has never been enough to justify a configuration change. If you ask me, the change could be justified neither by Jimmy's approval, nor by community consensus, without excluding a Foundation-level decision to the contrary.

If you want to know with any confidence if it will be enabled, you will need to wait for Brion or Erik to reply.

The poll itself was also horribly conducted. Half the people didn't even know what they were voting about, and there is very little awareness of what FlaggedRevs actually does. I expect that if we thought first and polled second, we might have come with a more convincing consensus, rather than what we have now, which is an unconvincing majority vote.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 9:32 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

The problem is that this stuff basically isn't set out anywhere. The procedure is not in the least transparent.

If it is, please point me at it.

As far as the sysadmins go, the procedure is quite transparent and explicit: file a bug with the "shell" keyword and an exact description of what's desired, together with a pointer to community consensus. The only unclear part of that is the last, and to the extent that's unclear, it's as much the wikis' fault as anyone's (seen a clear enwiki policy on "what is consensus" lately?). Of course, following this procedure does not currently guarantee that your request will be dealt with in a timely fashion, which is a problem that has been noted, but the procedure is quite clear in any event.

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 12:15 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

The "shell" keyword was a new one to me.

It may or may not actually be necessary.

Is the above actually written down anywhere other than your message? I suggest it should be.

It's probably written down in a bunch of places. If you want to write it down in some more places, be bold.

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 12:15 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

The "shell" keyword was a new one to me.

It may or may not actually be necessary.

For anything thats related to the maintaince of wiki's (eg: updating, changes, extenstion installs ect ect) it should be added so that it appears and can be found in a list of "shell" items (eg: http://min.ie/QA New/Reopened shell requests in the web interface)

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 5:17 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

2009/3/2 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:

...

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com wrote:

...

...

Is there a bug?

...

More significantly, is there evidence of community consensus?

There was a poll which came out about 59%:41% in favour, then Jimbo loudly and publicly requested that it be switched on. There's been a ton of publicity about it, and I find it frankly unbelievable it hasn't been mentioned even in passing in the WMF office. So if it's been sitting there for weeks so a dev can say "ah, but you didn't tick this box and file form 10-QF, so sorry" then that would be a marvellous illustration of passive sabotage, but not actually being helpful.

So, can anyone answer authoritatively?

As you may or may not be aware, after Jimbo threw his voice behind the issue he got a bunch of pushback from certain members of the community. At the time he ultimately ended up asking people to develop alternative proposals (or alternative ways of configuring Flagged Revisions). There was some discussion of this at various places for a couple weeks, but nothing that seemed to draw a lot of interest. So at least some delay was intentional to accommodate people who wanted to develop other points of view.

To the general question, the usual process (which is not necessarily the only process) is to file a bug request with specific configuration settings identified, and point to a community consensus that strongly favors adopting those settings. The FR trial proposal [1] that you mention with 60% support was specific, which is good. Though it is unclear whether 60% support is adequate for such a change. Historically, some devs have been lambasted for making much smaller changes with higher levels of support that nonetheless failed to reach a magical 2/3rds ratio (which some community members feel is the dead minimum for configuration changes). It is understandable that people can be reluctant to act if they know that either course is likely to draw criticism. If people on Wikipedia can't agree on what 60% support ought to mean, it is very difficult to ask the devs to figure it out.

At the current time, the way I see it there are three things that can happen:

1) A dev can stick his neck out to make a decision, either affirmative or negative, on whether the 60% survey justifies adopting the proposed "trial" settings. 2) The WMF can intervene to make a decision. 3) The enwiki community can try to reach a clearer consensus. (I do think one could build more than 60% support by compromising/engaging with some of the more moderate opposition.)

Personally, I'd regard 3) as the best outcome, while 2) is perhaps more likely. I would be surprised if any dev wants to jump into this absent either a stronger consensus or a WMF mandate. (Jimbo's personal opinion does not by itself constitute a mandate, though he could certainly put it on the Board's agenda and/or encourage Foundation staff to take up the issue.)

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions/Trial/Votes

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:

Options 1 and 2 are near enough to the same thing, since most of the sysadmins are part of the WMF. I'd be happy to enable it as proposed, on the basis of the poll, providing that Brion indicates that he has no objection to that action, after conferring with the rest of the San Francisco staff.

Excellent. For everyone's reference, note that the proposal actually included the full configuration requested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Trial#Technical_imp...

2009/3/2 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:

• is that a "yes", "no", "maybe", "reply hazy try again later" or what?

It's a "no". The support was below typical "rough consensus" support by Wikipedia standards, but bolstered by Jimmy's endorsement. Since Jimmy later committed to attempting to formulate a counter-proposal that will receive more support, that is primarily what we're waiting for right now. We're also open to the idea of him coming back to us and re-stating his support for the original proposal, or another community initiative that receives more support.

Erik

2009/3/2 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:

On 3/1/09 4:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:

...

What's the holdup in the flagged revisions trial on en:wp?

Last I heard, we're waiting for firm parameters on the test to be decided on by the community.

If you accept the 59% result as sufficient consensus, then we have those parameters. The proposal was formulated in such a way that we can run various trials without needing developer input after the initial switch-on. I think someone linked to the relevant page earlier in the thread.