On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 8:20 PM, private musings <thepmaccount(a)gmail.com> wrote: People do periodically check on bugged labeled shell. Only a very few people can fulfill them, so it may take a while, but it will happen eventually.

I don't know about those flagged revisions. After a while, it would basically mean that every edit and page view would be doubled. For most people, they'd have to double edit to flag their revision as the "latest and greatest" (lag) edit. In an edit war, as people revert the other persons' edit, they'd again flag their reversion as the lag edit. When people look at a page, of course they're going to want to see the lag version, so they'll constantly be flipping to see it -- unless there's something that they want to change and then they're going to have to pull up an edit difference to see what the changes are that have gone through but not been flagged as the lag version so that they know whether or not the change has already been fixed by someone. I think such a system might work well on a smaller wiki, but as a wiki grows bigger and bigger, flagged revisions start to mean less and less just as they become more and more unwieldly. I think a better solution would be to upgrade Huggle/Twinkle. As it now stands, the main antivandal programs are... somewhat stodgy. When you have a bunch of people all using them at once, you start to run into edit conflicts. Different people will be trying to revert the same page at the same time. But you know how you can set a page as "patrolled" in the "new revisions" section? Perhaps there should be a way to set that on Huggle/Twinkle, but for multiple users. There could be a flag that flips when there are more than X number of users actively running through Huggle/Twinkle. If the number of users is greater than X, then revisions are actually sent out to multiple people at once. This seems somewhat contradictory at first, the idea that you'll save time/resources and cover more pages if you have more people working on the same page, but it wouldn't revert as soon as you hit revert. It would just set the flag on that page and serve up the next page -- if a majority of reviewers reverts it, the vandalism is reverted and the vandal is warned. If the number of users is lower than X, then of course each person would instantly revert a page when they revert. But I spend a lot of time waiting for Huggle to revert a page and warn a user. This may not be the case for everyone, but I read very quickly. I read the last Harry Potter book in like a couple of hours, no joking. When I use Huggle, I spend the majority of my time waiting for Huggle to revert a page and warn a user (well, other than using Google to find other sites to check on factual accuracy, but that's another story). I just feel that the amount of edit conflicts while using Huggle and the amount that the same set of pages is looked over by the same set of people, all of whom are trying to individually revert, is just too much. There's far too much wasted time, in my opinion, because Huggle and Twinkle, although great, are just slightly inadequate to keep up with how big Wikepdia has become. It's so huge that it's impossible for one person to read it all, since it'd take a few years of continuous reading and it's growing faster than the fastest reader could read. I just think that flagged revisions will open up a can of worms and just hit the servers more than they're already being hit. This may work on the German Wikipedia, but the English Wikipedia is almost seven times bigger than the German one and I do believe en is growing much faster than de -- there are just far more users doing "stuff" on the English Wikipedia. 2009/5/19 Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org>

Ok, I'm not sure how I missed the top section (like the Wikimania and copyright sections) announcing something that's going to have such a huge effect on Wikipedia, but ok. Full steam ahead. ;) 2009/5/20 Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com>

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Bart <banaticus(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] Sorry to be curt, but why do people who have a weak understanding of the functionality available feel so compelled to make comments like this? The software supports automatically preserving the standing flagging (or some portion of it) when users with the authority to set those flags make edits. This eliminates the inherit doubling. The flagging communicates to users that a revision has been reviewed to some degree by an established user. This should allow review resources to applied more effectively rather than having 100 people review every change to a popular article while changes to less popular articles end up insufficiently reviewed. Furthermore, the existence of flagged versions in the history means that when a series of unflagged revisions are made they can be reviewed in a single action by viewing the diff against the the single most recent 'known-probably-good' flagged revision. Without these points in the history every single edit must be individually reviewed. The exact change in workload isn't clear: If there is an increase in workload then it would come from an increase from performing a review of changes by less-established users (those unable to set the flags) which previously went completely without review. I hope that there isn't currently enough completely unreviewed material that it would offset the time saving improvements of collaborative review and known-good comparison points. I'm sure that it is possible to find worthwhile criticisms of the flagging functionality (or the particular configuration requested by EnWP), but many people have worked very hard on this functionality and many of most obvious possible problems have been addressed. To produce an effective criticism you're going to need to spend a decent amount of time researching, reading discussion history, trying the software, etc. Maybe if you do you'll find that the functionality isn't as frightening as you feared and hopefully you'll find a new possible problem which can actually be addressed without rejecting this attempt at forward progress.

with apologies for re-vitalising a slightly old thread -I have a couple of follow ups, which it'd be great to try and make some progress on.... My understanding is that Aaron (whom I haven't 'met' - so hello!) has completed work on a test configuration of flagged revisions - I hope it's appropraite for me to ask directly on this list whether or not Aaron considers this development complete? (my understanding is that the extension is pretty much ready to go?) There is understandably considerable interest in the timeframe for installing flagged revisions, I would hope it would be a positive step to set some timeframes a bit tighter than 'hopefully by wikimedia' ;-) - is this list an appropriate context for such discusison, and if so (hopefullly) - could someone appropriately empowered flesh out the next steps a bit more, and maybe try and establish a timetable of sorts? My intention in posting about this every so often is to ensure that such an important development doesn't sort of slip through the cracks - I think communication on this matter has to date been ok, but not great - it'll be cool to improve it a bit :-) cheers, Peter, PM. On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 12:14 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: Does that flag the entire article, or only the change? To produce Nah, I only need the answer to that question :).

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Anthony<wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Individual revisions are flagged. So for the first time a page gets flagged, the person setting the flag will be expected to look over the entire article to make sure there is no lingering vandalism. If there is an earlier flagged version, and intermediate revisions are not flagged, then someone setting a flag on a new edit will be expected to check the changes since the last flagged version. Automatically flagging will mean something along the lines of "the immediately previous version is flagged and the person who made a change from that is trusted, therefore the change is trusted, therefore the whole article remains flagged." -Sage (User:Ragesoss)

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Anthony<wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Right. This also allows bots to be autoflaggers, as some or all are on German Wikipedia. -Sage