[WikiEN-l] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Anthony <wikiagk at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>If you haven't caught it— my strongly held and long standing recommendation is that we make >the process as invisible as possible: By overloading the cookie that is set when a user (inc. >anons) edits we can switch these people over to the draft-by-default view, either in a full-on all >articles sausage making mode like a logged in user, or just for the articles that they've edited.
>
> Are you suggesting that the draft (that is, the unvetted) version of a
> protected article be displayed by default to anonymous editors? Or
> have I misunderstood you?

I'm saying that IF you've edited an article you should continue to see
the draft version of that article, even if you're an anon, for at
least as long as your session cookie lasts.

Our interest in protecting the reader (and the subject of the article
via reader exposure) from the vulgarities of the editing process are
pretty much non-existence once the reader has stuck his arm in the
muck and become an editor.


I was also suggesting, as a possible alternative to the above, making
anons who have performed an edit get the unvetted version of _all_
articles for the rest of their session.  I believe would be somewhat
easier to implement and would largely fall under the same rationale as
above (e.g. if you've edited ANY article you're already in the top
99-th percentile in terms of understanding the possible fallibility of
Wikipedia).  If we assume that someone who has edited is far more
likely than average to edit again, then sticking them with the drafts
is good because they won't have the issue of attempting to make a fix
which is already existing in the most current draft version.

I guess we'd need to know what percentage of readers have the editing
cookie set ... based on text squid object hit rates I know it must be
a very low number, but I'm not sure exactly how low.


On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:37 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll say that I don't think it should be done, because it's basically
> lying to the casual editor - giving them the impression they have
> edited and their work has gone live, when it hasn't.
>
> It might allow us to present a more polished front, but I don't think
> deliberately misrepresenting what happens to the casual editor is a
> good idea.


I certainly don't want to lie.   But is it any less of a lie to imply
that "their work hasn't gone live" when, in fact, it very much has
gone live? It's just behind an additional click for the general
public, shown by default to tens of thousands of logged in users, and
shown to anyone who makes an edit to the article. Is "hasn't gone
live" really applicable when, if everything works well, it should be
the default for the general public as well typically within minutes—
and not the days or weeks that people would seem to assume?

If you go look at the early slashdot discussions about flagged
revisions there are a multitude of concerns raised about edits being
"reviewed" before going live.  For example,  _many_ people raised the
concern that no one would take the effort to merge these changes and
that they'd be lost when the next established user makes an edit,
others raised the concern that edits would be secretly vanished by the
reviewers that flagging would remove the transparency of the current
process.

When this was in the news I was grilled by some business contacts on
this— since they know of me as someone who knows about Wikipedia...
When I explained that the unreviewed versions were still available to
_everyone_, just not shown as default I got a rather mindblown
reaction.  It simply doesn't occur to people that you could have an
effective review system which isn't predicated on secrecy!

So given that a complete explanation will be far too complex and TL;DR
to include in a colored notice box— I think saying nothing is
significantly less dishonest than any implication that the edit isn't
live.

Alternatively, simply giving the users a link to a page describing the
complete edit life-cycle, "This page is [[protected]].",  would be
fine as well... those who care could go get a complete understanding,
the vast majority who don't care about the minutia of the editing
process can comfortably ignore it and not worry that their edit is
LESS likely to be used then it use to be.