[Wikiquality-l] Reverts

[Erik Moeller]

On 10/6/07, Aaron Schulz <jschulz_4587 at msn.com> wrote:
>  In that case, even one change to a template would make it not show. I fear
> that on wikipedia, that condition would rarely show up, and I'm not sure
> it's worth the performance hit.

I just did a quick sample of en.wp articles. Most have a template of
some kind, but most high-use templates are semi-protected, which means
they're only likely to be edited by users in the editor group anyway.
Those which aren't are typically not edited much at all. So how can
you conclude that the "sighted and current" condition would rarely
show up? Indeed, everything leads me to conclude that it's the _most
common_ condition; it's the one that we want to achieve on everything
through ever-improving patrolling mechanism.

To then not show a clear visual indication of the sighted status
utterly confounds me from a usability perspective. You end up with an
inconsistent UI where icons sometimes show up and sometimes don't with
no clear reason why. And you want to explain this with: "Oh, BTW, if
you look at the number of changes, and it's 0, then actually, not
taking templates into account, the main body of the article has been
sighted"? That's a usability nightmare. I found this issue so major
that I wasn't even comfortable with taking the extension demo live
before at least applying some band-aid.

I do agree that we should make sure it works correctly depending on
the template status. Which performance hit are you worried about
specifically? Shouldn't it just be a matter of looking up the flagging
status of the templatelinks associated with the page in question?
-- 
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik

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