[WikiEN-l] Jimmy Wales post on Huffington Post

[Brian]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 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
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
>
I'm not sure that your essay discusses openness. It mentions that the new
model will help with quality and could reduce participation (which could be
viewed as openness).

I think many people have a hard time with the logic that Jimmy is asking us
to follow, which is essentially, "by becoming more closed, we are becoming
more open."

When I read his Huffington Post essay it did occur to me that it's not
exactly true that high profile articles that are usually locked aren't able
to be edited by anonymous users. They can and do edit these articles by
arguing for, or suggesting, a valuable edit on the talk page. An admin can
then come along and make the edit, or briefly unlock the page, etc.. If we
compare this model to the FlaggedRevisions model, the difference is really
that these anons can edit locked pages without discussion. However, this
only increases the chance of the edit being accepted proportionally to the
quality and importance of the edit. The best way to increase the chances of
getting an edit to stick in both models is to stop by the talk page and make
the case for a change in the content of the article. That aspect will remain
unchanged. My view of the current system is that we already have a primitive
version of Flagged Revision that emerged out of more primitive wiki
technologies.

So as Joseph Reagle has said in this thread, and as you mention in your
essay, the question is really how much of the encyclopedia will be closed on
top of what we've already got closed. From your essay: "For the worse,
because they could reduce the level of participation, cause frustration, and
lead to a shift towards a much more restricted model of editing and
reviewing articles than is currently practiced."

I think this thread would benefit from some reasonable estimates of the
number of articles that will be locked under the new model, that way we know
exactly what we're dealing with when we discuss whether or not the new
perspective we are being asked to take of Flagged Revisions making the
encyclopedia more open is spin, or not spin.