[Wikiquality-l] default views

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 10/8/07, Aaron Schulz <jschulz_4587 at msn.com> wrote:
>
>  I don't think that is a good idea. It removes much of the editing incentive
> of getting an account and makes editing more tiresome for those who edit the
> most (users).

I don't agree.

I think that instead we should improve the interface and operation so
that it's not tiring for *anyone*. If there is a problem editing from
the flagged version then it should be fixed, not just left to only
impact people who will complain less.

One thing I've seen suggested is making anons always see the most
recent revision on articles they have recently edited (a session
length cookie could be used for tracking that).  That idea could be
extended to logged in users and also be applied to pages which the
user has watchlisted.  There should be no performance impact from
these because editing sets a session cookie already, and page loads
for logged in users already check watchlist status.

Doing this would do a lot to unify the view of Wikipedia for both
logged in logged out users even when there was widespread use of
flagging.

luca at soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
> I think most of you know more than I do about the dynamics of user
> contributions to the Wikipedia, but I am seriously worried that showing
> stable revisions

I too am worried: I am worried that people with long term histories of
categorical opposition to anything like stable versions might be
playing too much of a role in our implementation choices and we may
end up with a compromise system which combines all of the harms every
proposal and none of the charms.

We had a prior system for revision quality markup, "mark as
patrolled". The feature was considered a failure by many of our larger
communities.  Many people, myself included, believe it failed because
marking a revision didn't accomplish anything useful so there was
little incentive for anyone do anything with it.

If we do not use the ability to show the flagged version by default, I
fear that the revision flagging will be little more than marked as
patrolled and as much of a failure.

But at the end we don't need to worry about the worries: Instead we
can simply use objective measurements. If we turn on users defaulting
to the flagged revisions on ten thousand well distributed articles, we
can then track the performance. We can measure the amount of editing
before and after, we can automagically or manually measure the amount
of vandalism, we can see how often readers are seeing a stale versions
and how stale.

There is no reason to be afraid, we can use data to illuminate the dark.

The aggressive debating over the supposed risks of this feature are
counter productive.  None of us know what will happen because this is
new ground. All any of us can do is guess.  It would be really
arrogant of us to think that we'll have it right at the first cut.

What we should be discussing is not how stable versions should be done
but rather we should be discussing how to *study* stable versions.

My preference for a more aggressive implementation comes not because I
think I have some magic understanding that proves everyone's worries
wrong, instead it comes from two factors. (1) A more substantial
change should produce results which are easier to measure. (2) I view
the more aggressive implementation is closer to the ideal from the
quality perspective and since we are trying to improve quality we
should probably start testing from the ideal and back off until we
remove the negative side effects.

So, how can we best study the results?