[Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.

[Erik Moeller]

Hi Greg,

a quick note on Sue's behalf since we're all quite swamped right now.
On the tech side of things we're planning for the CTO transition right
now, as well as building up our capacity; those are core
foundation-building priorities that have to be higher than any
specific deployment, particularly given Brion's departure now.

We haven't committed to a specific FlaggedRevs deployment deadline
precisely because there isn't enough capacity right now to allocate to
the project. Pretty much all development work is done by a single
contractor, Aaron Schulz, who is amazing and deserves massive credit
for the fact that there is a usable FlaggedRevs extension at all,
which is in production use on our second-largest Wikipedia and many
others. There's no project manager for it, there are no other
developers who are assigned to working with Aaron, nor are there team
meetings to plan the further roll-out of the product.

The only situation where there's actually a dedicated full-time team
working on one specific problem-set is the usability project, and
that's because we've been able to receive an $890,000 grant
specifically to build it. It's time-limited, but we're looking for
ways to extend it past its grant run. As I think has been visible with
the successful roll-out of the usability beta, the milestones so far,
etc., this is one viable approach to get stuff done.

Should we have a dedicated quality assurance team? Perhaps; it's a
high-risk but potentially also high-gain technology priority. Is it
higher priority than, for example, massively improving mobile access
to Wikipedia and thereby potentially reaching hundreds of millions of
new readers/contributors? Maybe: The Strategy Project is designed to
help us answers these questions.  At this stage of organizational
development, we can possibly have 2-3 usability-sized tech projects
per year. There are other ways to support project roll-outs, such as
hiring product/project managers, which we've budgeted for but may have
to delay past the other planned tech hiring.

All that said, even with Brion transitioning, we're hoping to have at
least some scheduled small group conversations about the roll-out
plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it
in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The
scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with
de.wp, and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on
participation. The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp
implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the "flagged
protection" use case.

We're committed to getting there but at this stage I can't give you a
better promise than allocating some percentage of the core team to
supporting the UI development, testing, and production roll-out,
hopefully resulting in a full production roll-out prior to the end of
this year.

Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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