[Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs - Do you forget about other projects?

[William Pietri]

On 05/21/2010 08:51 AM, Chad wrote:
> There are two things wrong here.
>
> The first is attempting to reuse messages for different purposes. If
> the workflow and ideas behind the UI are different, then there need
> to be different messages, not changing of ones that work just fine
> and make plenty of sense to the thousands already using them.
>    

Agreed. Are other people using the English messages other than as a 
translation source?

> I'm aware of the distinction between FlaggedRevs and Flagged
> Protection, but it leads to the second problem. If the two proposals
> are so vastly different and their UIs different enough to cause issues
> with people already using it: why was it not done as a new extension
> entirely? Rather than trying to turn FR into the one-size-fits-all
> reviewing tool, it seems to me that we should've started a second
> extension. Of course it's too late to turn back now.
>    

I wasn't around for a lot of the history, but from what I know all of 
the decisions made at the time were reasonable. Straying for a moment 
into the always risky if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now mode, I think we 
would have been better off building a much less flexible extension to 
begin with, one more targeted to the initial actual use. For Flagged 
Protection, though, my understanding is that adding further 
configurability to FlaggedRevs was the most efficient choice.

Regardless, you're right that we can't change history, and that any 
major refactoring of the code should wait until after we launch. I'll 
make sure we talk about this in the post-launch retrospective, though.

> Short of forking the Enwiki changes to its own extension (which isn't
> feasible at this point, I'll be the first to admit), I would suggest trying
> to segregate the two as much as humanly possible. The UIs and workflow
> for what the English Wikipedia wants FlaggedRevs to do and what it's
> been doing on other wikis for years are vastly different, and trying to
> reuse aspects of one in the other (especially messages!) will just confuse
> people already happily using FR.
>    

Yep, agreed. We'll discuss this next we meet and see if we can come up 
with anything. Sounds like we'll be in the situation of having two sets 
of English strings: one as the generic translation source and one for 
use on the English Wikipedia. Is anybody aware of a precedent for that?

William