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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> 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,

Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet.
I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have
not yet been added to the test wiki at
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

> and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on
> participation.

Please help me understand the implications of this statement.

The English Wikipedia reached an overwhelmingly strong decision to try
a particular mode of operation. I hope you can appreciate how
difficult it can be to balance various interest and achieve agreement
on a change with such a widespread impact on a project as large and
well established as EnWP.

Enhancements were made to the software by volunteers to support the
proposal and a configuration was designed. Since then there has been
almost no progress in turning up a public trial wiki with this
configuration for testing and further refinement.

Now, "we" (I do know know for whom you speak) are concerned about an
underspecified concern regarding a negative impact on participation.
So? Now what? Does the now staff obstruct the rollout with passive
resistance and year+ delays?  Based both on the actions thus far and
on your statement this is what it sounds like to me.

Is this sort of over-concern regarding participation, so paranoid that
it obstructs a simple time limited trial of an article selective
feature, the behavior we can now expect from the WMF now that it has
substantial funding tied to unspecified participation goals?

I too am concerned about participation: I'm concerned that people who
came to build a project together will not want to participate under a
Wikimedia Foundation which views its contributors as 'users' rather
than partners.

Reaching a design for the policy and configuration and educating and
convincing people is the result of thousands of hours of volunteer
labor from hundreds of people across several years.  Moreover, the
ability to reach a decision to try something at this scale is a ray of
hope that EnWP hasn't become totally stuck and immune to change.  All
of this is wasted if the Wikimedia Foundation isn't able or willing to
hold up its side of its partnership with the community.

> The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp
> implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the "flagged
> protection" use case.

The community has largely taken care of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions/Implementation#PHP_configuration

Of course, there will need to be additional refinement but that can
not proceed until the test wiki is up.

> 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.

When will the test wiki be activated?  This requires something like
pasting 25 lines of configuration, an extension install, and kicking a
maintenance script.

Even if everything else is delayed having the text site up and running
would allow the community to test and provide feedback to volunteer
developers who can refine the software in advance of the availability
of resources for the large scale deployment.