[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] flagged revisions

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> What I *am* saying - and I suspect none of my countrymen
> would dispute me in this - is that  in  Finland  vandals are
> vastly overrun by people of good faith editing and cleaning
> after the vandals. So much so  that the vandals effect is
> easily negligible. Negligible over the long term, but also negligible
> in the moment.
>
> And thus, flaggedrevs would not provide nearly any added
> disincentive for vandals, but would add workload for the
> good faith editors, and slow down content production.
>
>
We are running flagged revisions on ru.wp for a year and a half now (250K
articles when started, 400K now), and even though the community was pretty
much sceptical in the beginning, now only a couple of vocal critics
remain. To my experience, the main problem with flagged revisions is not
so much vandalism which indeed gets reverted immediately but massive
copyright violations. If an anonymous user has introduced a piece of 10K
text in an article which has previously been 5K by a single edit this is
always a point of concern. Checking whether this text violates copyright
can easily take half an hour or more. Checking an old article can take two
hours. Introducing flagged revisions one actually avoids the situation
when several active editors spend their time for doing the same work.

Cheers
Yaroslav