[WikiEN-l] Who gets to flag? (BBC Newsnight tonight! re: flagged revs)

[FT2]

Try this as a general approach:


   - This is not a new idea.
   - We've got vandalism down to under one article in 200, and a variety of
   advanced programs and patrols of hundreds of users who get the usual fixing
   time down to seconds or minutes when it does happen.
   - But obviously we want to do even better.
   - A lot of people gauge Wikipedia in terms of quantity of edits. The last
   2 years the focus has been on improving quality of edits, and especially,
   finding even better ways to prevent deliberately harmful edits such as
   vandalism.
   - Our historical answer is "protection" - everyone is prevented from
   editing a page if it is being badly mis-edited. That's highly disruptive and
   frustrates many edits since one bad apple can hold up the process.
   - A more recent addition is the Abuse filter, a system that allows
   flagrantly bad edits to be prevented but lets through good ones. It's a
   program though so it can't differentiate apparently good posts that are
   really not good.
   - Our newest answer is therefore this thing called "flagged revisions" -
   the requirement that when an edit is made to a sensitive article, someone
   who's been round a while, which is one of thousands of users, checks to say
   it's okay, before letting it go "live".
   - Our test bed has been the german wikipedia, the second largest language
   to English in the Wikipedia websites.
   - Our main target and test bed is articles about people, because those
   are seen to be more sensitive and of special importance to get right. The
   wider reported vandalism cases usually relate to these articles, just
   because articles about people are so visible. So it makes sense to apply
   possible solutions to these and see what effect it has on editing quantity
   and quality.

That's how I'd explain it (condensed and simplified as needed for the media
concerned).

FT2


On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/8/26 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> > 2009/8/25 Joseph Reagle <reagle at mit.edu>:
> >
> >> In speaking to the press today, one of the things I believe I heard in
> an intro segment on a live radio discussion was that WP would have
> professional editors flagging trusted content. I didn't get a chance to
> correct that, and I know who gets to review is still up in the air to some
> extent [1], but that's a likely source of confusion to the public
> apparently.
> >
> >
> > IME the problem is the use of the word "editor". We use it as in "tens
> > of thousands of volunteers", everyone else assumes we mean as in "the
> > boss who decides what goes in." It's a jargon versus English problem.
>
> I think the problem comes from the fact that all our articles are
> collaborative works. Normally there is a writer and an editor and they
> are distinct jobs. We have everyone as editors since everyone can
> change what other people have written. That is very unusual and the
> English language hasn't had a change to adapt to it.
>
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