[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikiquality-l] Current Status

[Ian Woollard]

On 14/01/2008, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> Flagged revisions is an important, beneficial change that everybody wants.
> There *is* a difference (I hope).


Well, proof of the pudding, I tried it out on the wikiQA server.

Basically:
- it gives semiprotection-like features to an article, but that are
permanent, as in a lot of people's edits may not appear for indefinite
periods, if people don't feel they are making a contribution, they won't
- the UI is confusing (as in the software did weird things that were not
obvious, and I'm a software engineer, if it's not obvious to me it's
probably a bad idea, if setting an article in a weird mode confuses me, then
imagine what joe user would think)
- the QA server didn't work as advertised on described features e.g. people
didn't get automatically promoted to be able to do QA, but the documentation
implied it would happen (a bug or misconfigured)
- the QA server gave whole new ways for guys like WillyOnWheels to vandalise

It seems overcomplicated and rather overambitious, and not especially well
thought out.

If it ever works it will be because of a whole bunch of extra bots,
processes and admin leg work; and a lot more developer graft.

I'd say this could be a disaster; I'm hoping not, but I'm not betting either
way.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.