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

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 2009/9/28 Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia-inc.com>:
>> If the Foundation is bottlenecked at the moment (understandable) then
>> how can I help, how can we the community help, to take some of the
>> burden off of them to get done what we need to get done for the sake of
>> our mission?  :-)
>
> The process going forward is pretty clear -
>
> a) make sure prototype setup reflects desired behavior as per the
> en.wp proposal and invite broader testing;
> b) make revisions to extension based on public and internal review
> with a particular eye to usability;
> c) ensure that the extension is fully scalable to en.wp traffic volume;
> d) deploy on en.wp as per proposal (potentially, per c, initially in
> some scale-limited fashion).
>
> Brion's going to look into the prototype situation ASAP, and we have a
> scheduled call with Aaron later this week to talk about any obvious
> changes that he can focus on immediately. The most obvious way for
> people to help is to give feedback during the testing period. Beyond
> that, I would ask for patience and goodwill as we're managing many
> competing priorities right now, and things are pretty stressful.


One thing to note...

The Foundation and its ops staff are the people we the community trust
to keep the site running and upgraded.

Keeping the site running - being responsible and making sure that
changes are properly tested, don't introduce failures, etc - often
conflicts with keeping the site (software) updated/upgraded to the
latest tools or features.

As someone who both deals with BLP issues for which flagged revisions,
and does web operations as my day job, I understand this tension.
It's natural.  But it's also healthy that the foundation / ops staff
are taking their time about it.

I understand that a lot of people may be frustrated by the delay.  In
my professional opinion, it's the Foundation doing the right thing,
pacing upgrades as confidence is built that the ops impact will be
handled appropriately.

If we take the site down for very long we'll get on CNN, for all the
wrong reasons.  Web ops staff's goal in life should be to avoid being
on CNN  8-)


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com