[WikiEN-l] So, what is the deal with flagged revisions?

[Apoc 2400]

>
> So apparently all the press reporting is wrong. What's the real story?
> For some reason, I've never actually come across these flagged
> revisions, partly because they always seemed to be happening "in the
> future some time". What's the policy going to be?
>

You get different answers depending on who you ask. This is because people
tend to tell you how they want it to be rather than what the community
actually approved. Even Jimbo and the foundation staff have been guilty of
this.

What is being implemented has two parts, flagged protection and patrolled
revisions. The important part is flagged protection. It is a new kind of
protection besides full and semi. When an article is flagged-protected
readers will not see a new version until it has been flagged.

1) Is this going to apply to every page?

No, only on pages that are flagged-protected individually. I expect there
will be a push to flagged-protect all BLPs (biographies of living people)
but nothing is decided yet. I would personally support that if there are
enough reviewers to keep the backlog short.


> 2) Who gets to flag a revision? Can you flag your own reivsions?

This is very much undecided. Some think becoming a reviewer should be like
autoconfirmation, some think like rollback, while a few think it should be
harder to get than adminship. Hopefully it will be adjusted depending on how
many reviewers are needed.


> 3) What's the interface like? How many clicks?
>
I don't know yet. There is a test implementation at
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org


> 4) Is there any automatic flagging?

There are actually three levels of flagged protection. In semi flagged
protection edits by autoconfirmed users are automatically flagged. In
intermediary flagged protection (probably the most common case) only edits
by reviewers are automatically flagged. In full flagged protection only
administrators (not reviewers) can flag.


> 5) Are you supposed to "check" an entire article prior to flagging it?
> How confident are you meant to be?
>
The reviewer is only meant to check the diff from the previous flagged
version. It should be checked for:
 * conflict with the Biographies of Living People policy
 * vandalism or patent nonsense
 * copyright violations
 * legal threats, personal attacks or libel.

Reviewers are not required to check for neutrality, original research,
sources, etc. Of course, obvious cases are better reverted right away than
flagged. I expect there will be some conflict over this. In my opinion it is
very important that we keep the flow of Bold, Revert, Discuss. Controversial
articles must not be constantly backlogged because reviewers are afraid of
getting drawn into an edit war.


> 6) What will encourage flaggers to actually bother flagging articles?
>
Who knows? We'll see.


> 7) What will encourage non-flaggers to actually bother editing
> articles when they don't have any instant gratification?

Good question. Perhaps that an edit will eventually go live unless it's
really bad.

8) Which view will long time editors see by default? Stable (flagged)
> or non-flagged version?

I think flagged, but you can change it in your preferences.


> 9) Can non-logged in editors see non-flagged versions?
>
I am quite sure yes.


> 10) Will this destroy Wikipedia?

Surely not. The potential problems depend on how quickly edits get flagged
and how strict reviewers are. If it takes weeks before anyone even looks at
an edit and reviewers refuse to flag anything they don't actively like, then
we are no more open than Britannica. After all, I can email a suggested
change to them and probably get a reply. Our advantages are:
* You can edit right in the code rather than describe your change in an
email
* Edits don't just get lost in someones inbox. Eventually an edit is either
approved or reverted.
* Speed, if we manage
* A more open attitude, I wish
Remember also that later edits build on the latest draft. There is no
branching so a new persons edits cannot be left unflagged while the regulars
keep editing.


> 11) Will this improve Wikipedia?

Hopefully. Especially for BLPs I think this has a lot of potential.
Currently a damaging edit can last way too long in articles about obscure
but notable people.


So far I ignored the second part: patrolled revisions. This is enabled on
all articles, but readers see the latest version whether flagged or not. It
is used to know whether an edit has been checked or not, so the time of
recent changes patrollers can be used more efficiently. Whether it will
actually be used on all articles is unsure. I expect it will be used mostly
on BLPs, and on other articles if the reviewers have time.

Finally, this is supposed to be a two month trial. What happens after that
is very uncertain.

For details, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisionsand
the subpages linked at the top.

/Apoc2400