[WikiEN-l] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions

[William Pietri]

On 3 May 2010 17:59, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> As the software currently stands, however,  it generates some rather 
> obnoxious messages advising you that your edits won't be visible until 
> they've been reviewed... but I hope that we get rid of that before launch.


On 05/03/2010 11:25 AM, Gregory Maxwell 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.
>
>    

We discussed this at some length today, and I wanted to update everybody.

 From our perspective, there are two parts to this. One is using cookies 
to make it so that anons see their edits when looking at pages where 
they have pending edits. The other is de-emphasizing (or at the extreme, 
concealing) the fact that some edits will require approval.

We think the first part is a great idea, but not crucial for launch. So 
we've added to the backlog, and barring some sort of excitement that 
demands more immediate attention, we'll get to it soon after launch.

For the second part, we're concerned. There are reasonable arguments on 
both sides. It's a solution to a problem that's currently only 
hypothetical, that anons will be put off if we're clear about what's 
actually going on. Even if there is some effect like that, we'd have to 
weigh that against our project's strong bias toward transparency. And if 
despite that we decided it was worth doing, we still think it's not 
crucial to do before launch.

So given all that, we think it's better and wait to see if hypothetical 
problem becomes an actual problem; at that time we'll have better data 
for deciding how to handle the problem. As mentioned earlier, the 
Foundation is committed to supporting the experiment with further 
development as needed, so resources are already allocated if this 
becomes an issue.


We hope that everybody is at least provisionally satisfied with that, 
and I'd ask those most worried about this to keep an eye on things after 
launch and if necessary raise the issue again, optionally with a 
well-earned I-told-you-so.


William