[Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for May 6

[William Pietri]

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.

The main news is that the team had a meeting this week with Danese and 
Erik to discuss rollout plans. Everybody concurs that we're close enough 
to launch to start a few release-related activities:

1) Starting a discussion with the enwiki community about how they'd like 
to handle the use of the feature once it's live,
2) Writing the release documentation,
3) Preparing for media interest,
4) Doing a final performance evaluation, and
5) Allocating engineering time to handle the rollout.

This will pull in a variety of people, all of whom we're excited to have 
involved, including Tim, Jay, Moka, Rob L., Rob H, and even Mike G. a 
bit. Adam has also offered us to help us solve some cross-browser CSS 
issues that have been confounding us, for which we are grateful. Keep an 
eye out for activity relating to these efforts in the coming days and weeks.

The actual release schedule depends on a number of factors, including 
the results of testing, the speed with which we resolve a couple of 
remaining UI difficulties, and the extent to which community testing on 
Labs turns up new issues.


Speaking of which, if you'd like to try out the current software, you 
can do so here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Lest you think it has achieved perfection, both Tango and Eper turned up 
interesting issues just this week. Thanks to them and the other testers!


To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_updates#2010_May_6


To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and 
Backlog:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157


We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter 
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.


William

P.S. On a personal note, after a dozen years of consulting, I've decided 
to join an early-stage web startup. Post launch, once things are running 
approximately smoothly, I'll be handing off my duties to Rob Lanphier, 
aka User:RobLa. I would ask everybody to be nice to him so I can safely 
make my escape, but there's no need; he's been around this place since 
2001. But you should still be nice to him because he's a good guy who 
loves Wikipedia.