[WikiEN-l] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:08 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3 May 2010 19:56, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> Saying who the edit is visible to ("Your edit is visible to you and
> any logged-in users") rather than who it isn't visible to ("Your edit
> has been placed in a collective in tray for someone to get around to
> sometime maybe never") would probably be nicer too.
>
> As long as it's clear enough!

I think I agree with David. But I think it might be helpful to go
through the possible situations.

1. problem: no one understands what's going on.
1a. time should be spent, by someone who understands it -- and then by
someone who doesn't to copyedit* -- on writing a very, very, very
clear explanation of the flaggedrevs setup that is planned for
implementation. Then this page can be linked to in whatever noticebox
explanation that may or may not appear on editing. It can also be
given to news reporters, because you know the "wikipedia has
implemented review" stories are going to start flying once we set this
thing up on en: (they already started flying when it was just a
proposal).

2. problem: psychology of the anonymous editor: what's the best
outcome for a in-good-faith editor?
2a. we already disallow anons from editing semiprotected articles. So
in lieu of that, having a box that pops up that says "this article is
under protection, and therefore your edit is subject to review"
doesn't seem so bad. Note this isn't necessarily a great solution for
the entire site, but just for those articles that were formerly
uneditable at all by anons.

2b. For editing in general (assuming it ever gets that far), I can
think of a few test cases. My sense of the matter is that for
experienced editors making a change is not such a big deal; each
individual edit neither costs us much or is that important to our
experience of the site. But if you are a new editor -- let's say a
newly registered account or anon -- each change is worth a lot and is
meaningful. I've certainly talked to a lot of folks interested in
wikipedia who have told me, proudly, that they have made five edits.
For those folks, their five edits are individually each important --
important in their understanding of how wikipedia works and for their
sense of being a contributor.

That said, I think we need to try and imagine people's behavior around
their edits. Would they go and look at the article again later (post
session-cookie) to see if their change stuck? I think they probably
would. I also think the experience of seeing an edit "go live" is
pretty magical.
So how we deal with this is dependent on 1, how flaggedrevs works --
but I would think that some sort of clarifying statement -- who the
edit is visible to, and where to go to see the version with the edit
-- might be nice rather than the impression, on later viewing, that
they've been reverted because their edit isn't showing up.

2c. for non-good-faith editors -- vandals -- it might be nice to also
have a notice to this affect, to let people know that their edits are
being looked at; each vandalism transaction does have a cost and it
could be good to let people know that.

2d. Having the data on how long it takes to flag revisions would be
nice -- and I suspect that if the trial is started with only
protected/semiprotected articles it won't be long at all. If it's only
minutes the messages might be slimmed down & Greg's idea of an
invisible transaction carries more weight with me.

3. problem: we don't really know how this is going to pan out
3a. I see a lot of conflicting rhetoric about why we want flaggedrevs
and what its role is. Indeed, if the goal is to promote wikipedia as
more accurate (tm), then I see no special problem about notifying
people that their edits are reviewed -- as Anthony says some might
welcome it. If we want it to be an invisible process, part of the
mysterious inner workings of the site along with template markup and
RFCs, then Greg's idea makes more sense.

-- Phoebe

* for instance, I have no idea what's going on, despite following this
thing half-heartedly for years. so I'm pretty sure I could copyedit
the documentation from the point of view of a clueless n00b.