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

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>> 2009/9/28 Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia-inc.com>:
>>   
>>> 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?  :-)
>>>     
>>
>> The process going forward is pretty clear -
>>
>> a) make sure prototype setup reflects desired behavior as per the
>> en.wp proposal and invite broader testing;
>>     

Perfectly reasonable.
>> b) make revisions to extension based on public and internal review
>> with a particular eye to usability;
>>     
Absolutely commendable.
>> c) ensure that the extension is fully scalable to en.wp traffic volume;
>>     
Why on earth would we like to ensure that, particularly
*before* point d) ?

I can fully understand that there is a contingent
who devoutly hopes that after the current strictly limited
use of FR is tried out and people gain more familiarity
with the interface and the practical way the extension
works, much of the mystique of it will vanish in a puff
of smoke and people will be more amenable to extending
its use.

Nevertheless in reality the current compromise proposal
owes much to people who were able to only accept it with
the proviso that quite the opposite of wanting to see it be
possible to scale up, they required a reasonable assurance
that its use would *not* be escalated without an overwhelming
community consensus.
>> d) deploy on en.wp as per proposal (potentially, per c, initially in
>> some scale-limited fashion).
>>     
Not doing d) before being sure of c) seems very much like
putting the cart before the horse to me. Whether c) will be
relevant at all would necessarily be contingent on the
success of d), and the logical order thus should be to just
do d) and see later if there is any relevance to c) at all.

Or to put it more plainly; it is a very remote possibility
indeed that extending the Flagged Revision experiment
in a form that ordinary articles would only display an
approved revision (without very strict restrictions on
which articles to apply this requirement to) for many
people will be something they will accept. So making
it a prerequisite that such an application has to be
functionally available in the extension for uses as large
as the English wikipedia before *any* use of the extension,
is rather silly as a concept.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen