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

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:52 PM, Andrew
Turvey<andrewrturvey at googlemail.com> wrote:

<snip>

>> 1) Is this going to apply to every page?
>
> No. People have been talking about all living person articles, although the community may of course decide to roll it out to all articles in the future, or indeed have it more restricted. The German Wikipedia applies in to every page.

Will it apply to talk page or other pages outside of articles if it
was rolled out further? Does de-wiki have it apply to all pages in all
namespaces?

>> 2) Who gets to flag a revision?
>
> Members of the user group "Reviewer". All Admins will automatically be given reviewer status and all other users will be able to apply for it at [[WP:Request for permissions]]; like rollback there will be a presumed threshold of number of edits and time since account was opened. An initial poll rejected the idea of autopromotion, but I notice this issue has been reopened because "only" 50 people participated in that discussion.

To be fair, as more people become aware of this, there will be more
calls for bigger and longer discussions. That is only natural. Rather
then risks continual re-discussion, it should be made clear that
everyone will get the chance to say something at the end of the trial.
And if they don't, well, that will cause huge upset.

> I think the idea was all entries with [[Category:Living persons]] would be automatically flagged.

This is one reason I asked for an edit filter to be set up to monitor
how often people add and remove this category and how often vandals do
this (either intentionally, or as part of another edit). Of course,
once you have the flagged 'protection' in place, reviewers will be
able to prevent removal of the category. But that is something to
watch for.

> There's a "working draft" at [[Wikipedia:Reviewing guideline]] which says you can pass an edit if it doesn't contain any vandalism, patent nonsense, copyvios, legal threats, personal attacks or libel. Basically, this is a high level review, not intended to go into the details that you might get on a talk page.

Some of those items are difficult to sort out when only taking a brief
look at the edit or article. Copyvios in particular can be hard to
detect - I hope people are lenient on reviewers who let things slip
through. In BLPs, copyvios can sometimes be the subject trying to
upload something they have written previously (and not really
intending to GFDL what they wrote).

> Wikipedia needs to continue recruiting new contributors in order to keep its current success. This has already been identified as a problem and flagged revisions may make this worse. We need to address this risk.

Both recruiting and *keeping* new contributors (i.e. welcoming them
and helping them learn how to edit Wikipedia).

Carcharoth