[Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone,

As William alluded to, a bunch of us have been studying the user interface
for Flagged Protections and figuring out how to make it more intuitive.

In trying to solve the user interface problems as well as generally figuring
out how we're going to talk about this feature to the world at large, it
became clear that the name "Flagged Protections" doesn't adequately describe
the technology as it looks to readers and editors. It's a tough name to work
with. This iteration of the technology is very different from the German
implementation, and there's no "flagging" in the proposed configuration.
Additionally, "protection" in our world implies "no editing" whereas this
feature actually opens up pages currently protected so that everyone can
edit.

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.

Here were some criteria we're using to find a name:

   - Must not introduce obsolete terminology (e.g. there's no "flagging" in
   our proposed deployment)
   - Terminology should be consistent with terms we want to use in the user
   interface
   - Must not make too strong of a statement of quality/consensus or terms
   that make us out as publishers approving content from the mountaintop
   - Should not imply we're creating an elite new classes of users
   - Should not convey a strong sense of restriction. The feature, as
   proposed for the trial [1], is less restrictive than semi-protection
   - Should not be too geeky/too technical/too jargony
   - Should not be too slick/too cutesy. We're not doing this in the name of
   creating glossy brochures with pictures of a conference room full of people
   in formal business attire nodding with approval at a projection of a pie
   chart - we just want a name that won't be confusing.

It turns out that filters out quite a few names (including "Flagged
Protection" among other things). Here's the alternatives that made the cut:

   - "Pending Revisions" - this name is very consistent with what everyone
   will see in many parts of the user interface, and what it will be used for
   (i.e. providing a queue of pending revisions)
   - "Double Check" - this was a late entrant, but has the distinct
   advantage of clearly communicating what we envision this feature will be
   used for (i.e. enforcing a double check from a very broad community).

A protracted debate on the name will likely delay the eventual launch on the
feature, so we're hoping we can have a quick, respectful discussion on the
merits of the different proposals so that we can make the change quickly and
move on. We really need to have a name fully locked down no later than
Friday, May 28. Please let us know your thoughts here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions/Terminology

We're in the process of working on a lot of terminology tweaks in the user
interface in anticipation of the launch. If you're interested in that detail
work, I'll post more information about that on wikitech-l (hopefully by
end-of-day Monday), as well as on the talk page above.

Rob

[1] - See the proposed configuration for trial phase:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions/Trial