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

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/9/29 Surreptitiousness <surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com>:
> Couple of points I want to raise.  I was wondering if this system will
> make another Siegenthaller incident more or less likely. My
> understanding is that the flagged revs is only to prevent obvious
> vandalism, it isn't set up so that each addition has to be verified
> before it goes live.  Is that correct? If so, wouldn't that mean that
> once something has been through the flagged rev net, there's a
> possibility of a culture arising that assumes such edits are "good"
> edits, and they don't get checked in greater detail.  Looking at it,
> it's entirely plausible we're going to have people from all over the
> world examining edits outside their context. That's going to mean things
> will get missed, isn't it?  Not saying it isn't any better than the
> current model, but at least with the current model someone will not
> assume something is good since they will know it hasn't been checked.

There should be two separate stages of review for all edits (both now
and with FlaggedRevs) - there is RC-patrol that just checks for
vandalism and then there are people going through their watchlists to
check if edits have actually improved the article. If people start
thinking that passing RC-patrol means they don't need to check it when
it appears on their watchlist, then we have a problem, but let's wait
and see if that actually happens or not.

> Secondly, isn't it plausible that the longer a flagged rev isn't passed,
> the more likely it is that it will never pass.  By which I mean that if
> something sits there for ten to fifteen minutes, people will start to
> get nervous about passing it, because they will attach an irrational
> fear to it, basing that on the perceived fact that if it wasn't a
> complicated issue it would have passed by now? Does that make sense?
> And then it seems the two sort of feed into each other. We either pass
> stuff unless it's blatant, but then we miss targeted, malicious
> disruption, or we go in depth but then run the risk of rendering the
> solution unworkable.  Apologies if these have been discussed before.  I
> still don't have a real handle on how it will all work.



> But I'm still failing to understand why the community won't semi-protect
> all BLP's.

Is there actually a need to? I think most of our serious BLP problems
are caused by experienced, but misguided, editors. We should only
throw a way a very useful resource (new editors) if we have a good
reason.