[WikiEN-l] So what does Flagged Revs feel like?

[Brian]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/9/26 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> > If you want to know how Flagged Revisions feels from an unprivileged
> > position, go to Wikinews and fix typos. I just did this on
> >
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Geelong_win_2009_Australian_Football_League_Grand_Final
> > - check the history. I'm not an admin or reviewer on en:wn.
> >
> > What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live
> > immediately left me wondering just when it would - five minutes/? An
> > hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki - it felt like I'd
> > submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at
> > their leisure.
> >
> > Don't take my word for it - go typo-fixing on Wikinews and tell me how
> > it feels to you.
> >
> > So, yeah. I remain a big fan of flagged revisions for those times when
> > we need it - basically, as a less-worse alternative to protection or
> > semiprotection. But it really does kill the wiki motivational buzz
> > dead.
>
> I think we should have flagged revs for as many articles as we can
> keep up-to-date with. If it takes more than 5 minutes (preferably 1
> minute) to review an edit (except for occasional times when somehow a
> backlog builds up and it takes a few minutes for people to realise and
> work through it), then we have failed. If we can have every single
> article on flagged revs and still keep on top of them, then we should
> do that. If we can't, then we should keep it to just a small number of
> articles that really need it.
>
>
I strongly agree with this. We should view our ability to flag-lock articles
as a resource which is limited by the number of editors that are able to
sustainably review such edits. As long as we are able to handle the edits in
near real time we haven't over-sold/over-extended our capacity. Anything
like the experience others are describing in this thread is probably
(hopefully...) going to be found unacceptable by Wikipedia.