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

[Steven Walling]

Gregory,
To address:

"My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly
overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki...WMF's
priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that
it can't complete a simple request for its
largest project.."

I don't want to start a big debate about a small point, but you seem to be
assuming that FlaggedRevs is of a higher priority to most volunteers than
the usability project or the strategy initiative.

I think it's important to remember that we're a huge organization with
diverse (to put it mildly) opinions on what is most important at the moment.
Both our strategy for the future and usability improvements are projects
near and dear to the hearts of many volunteers, myself included. Anyone with
the impression that it's only those handing out big grants who care about
this work is mistaken.

Many thanks to folks from the Foundation for responding quickly to the
request for a FlaggedRevs update.

Steven Walling

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:53 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia-inc.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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