[Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.

[Jimmy Wales]

I think I can sum this up in a reasonably NPOV way.

We in the community very very badly want this to happen as quickly as 
possible.  We had a very long discussion and came to an overwhelming 
consensus.  We feel frustrated that it is taking so long.

We on the Foundation side of things very very badly want this to happen 
as quickly as possible.  For a variety of reasons, including that there 
is specific funding for some projects, but not for this one, some 
obvious ways to make this happen faster haven't happened yet.

Everyone on all sides is interested and concerned to know what the 
impact of this will be on a variety of metrics: general quality, 
participation overall, participation by newbies, reduction of BLP harm, 
etc.  Everyone is agreed that the trial should happen and then be judged 
rationally, in a data-driven way, and the configuration changed and 
retested if there appear to be better ways to do it.

Now we can quibble about the details of what should have been done 
already (and I think it is clear that things have not been perfect, but 
then again, things have never been perfect anywhere, and yet we muddle 
through :-) ).  But mostly I hope we focus on what we should do NOW.

If the Foundation is bottlenecked at the moment (understandable) then 
how can I help, how can we the community help, to take some of the 
burden off of them to get done what we need to get done for the sake of 
our mission?  :-)

--Jimbo