[WikiEN-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

Carcharoth carcharothwp at googlemail.com
Sat May 22 04:58:12 UTC 2010


On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> So, we would like to make a change to the name of the "Flagged Protections"
> feature prior to deploying it to en.wikipedia.org. Under the hood, we would
> still be using the "FlaggedRevs" extension (no change there), but the name
> that we talk about in the user-visible portions of the site and
> documentation would be something new.

I agree that "revisions" is a bit opaque and jargony. "Edits" is
better. I also think that "Double Check" suffers from the presumption
that the edits allowed through will have been properly checked (maybe
"initial check"?). To my mind, it will be more like "screening" or
"patrolling" where the edits get minimal checking to weed out the
worst ones, and most edits go through. Further checking is *still*
needed both after an edit is patrolled or screened.

It is indeed possible to set up a FlaggedRevs system to have a high
level of checking, but the name should change to reflect the level of
checking being done, or be flexible enough to apply to different
levels of checking. If it is purely an anti-vandalism effort, then
that should be reflected in the name.

And the best people to try names out on are non-Wikipedians. After
consulting a thesaurus.

I would say

"New edits patrol" (but that implies some may get missed) or
"Screening new edits" (screening may be opaque) or "New edits queue"
(implies that things are dealt with in order but also implies a long
waiting time) or "Edit filter" (might get confused with the feature
that already has that name, but really this is after all a
human-managed version of the filters that automatically exclude
content using programmed filters, except here the filter is a mass of
human brains briefly checking the edits).

Longer stuff like "initial low-level approval designed to filter out
vandalism" won't fly, I guess? :-)

By the way, I'm assuming that some edits will be of the sort "I would
normally remove the material and start a talk page discussion". In
that case, is the right thing to do to approve the edit and then
remove the material and start a talk page discussion, and presumably
as a reviewer, your edit removing the material won't be caught up in
flagged revisions itself?

Carcharoth



More information about the WikiEN-l mailing list