[WikiEN-l] Who gets to flag? (BBC Newsnight tonight! re: flagged revs)
David Gerard
dgerard at gmail.com
Tue Aug 25 23:53:28 UTC 2009
2009/8/26 FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com>:
> 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).
Or, to precis:
1.) Oxygen is good.
2.) Competition is bad.
3.) I like jello.
Leave out the jello to avoid any confusion.
- d.
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