[WikiEN-l] Jimmy Wales post on Huffington Post

[Erik Moeller]

2009/9/21 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> It's hard to follow everything that goes on here, but I distinctly remember
> when FlaggedRevisions was developed, and per my recollection openness was
> not one of the original arguments that caused the foundation to contract its
> development. If anyone knows more than me and cares to clear up my
> misconceptions, that'd be great.

Flagged Revisions type systems were discussed back in 2002-2003, long
before BLPs became a focal point of concerns, as a method of "sifting"
articles from Wikipedia into stable versions. The idea that flagging
could increase openness for some pages is also not just some recently
applied "spin". I wrote an essay three years ago when the discussion
about a specific implementation became more serious, detailing my own
recommendations for some of the functional requirements of a flagging
system:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/WikiQA

"However, as noted above, a global setting to show sighted revisions
in preference to unsighted ones should not be enabled unless and until
it is found to scale sufficiently well, and to not have a dramatic
negative impact on the user experience. Instead, revision preference
should first be enabled on a per-page level, allowing administrators
to "quality protect" pages. This would be an alternative to full
protection or semi-protection, and allow edits to be made where it is
currently impossible. The criteria for quality protecting pages could
be expanded over time, allowing for community-directed application of
the functionality, rather than an a priori assumption of scalability."

The group of users on the German Wikipedia favoring a flagging system
preferred a more conservative implementation, which was my primary
motivation for writing the essay. As a Board member at the time, I
shared my recommendations with Jimmy and others, and we agreed back
then that a model that allowed an increase in openness on pages that
are currently semi-protected would be preferable for en.wp. This is
ultimately also what the en.wp community concluded.

It's only fair to acknowledge, of course, that a significantly larger
number of pages may end up being "flagged protected" than are
currently semi-protected, resulting in an experience of reduced
openness/immediacy for the pages not previously included in the set.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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