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

[Brian]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Greg, why can't we just put the code up on the Toolserver? Why does the
foundation need to be involved at all?