I'm less concerned with blatant vandalism than sly, subtle mistakes (think John Seigenthaler), and even good-faith errors. I think we've misidentified the problem- we needn't worry about an short-lived, all-caps declaration that so-and-so is such-and-such. Vandalism is a problem, yes, but it isn't the biggest one. We need a more rigorous review system that will address important factual errors (there are plenty of them) and give Wikipedia more scholarly credibility. The concept of quality flagging is a good start, but are there any concrete plans as to how it will work? The only plans I've heard are just ideas. Will an editor be able to issue a quality flag just by giving it a quick review, or will there be thorough, comprehensive process?
Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote: Let's assume for a minute that this feature gets deployed on the projects. Large projects get it and small ones don't, for the purposes of this analogy.
Given that vandalism wouldn't appear to the majority of viewers of the site (anons), wouldn't this therefore mean vandalism in and of itself would go down? Vandalism is committed (as far as I know) to get the shock value of having someone read a wrong page. However, on the wikis that do not have this feature, would it make vandalism go up? Given the vandals would find out which have it and which don't (an easily obtainable piece of information), would they potentially take a higher effort on those wikis that don't have it, since they know it is more likely to not get reviewed? That being said, we have very few dedicated vandals. The majority of vandals are drive-bys who (when seeing their vandalism doesn't work on the English Wikipedia) would give up, I think.
-Chad H.
On 9/24/07, ulim ulim@mayring.de wrote: --- "P. Birken" pbirken@gmail.com wrote:
No, this is indeed a valid concern. A feature that allows to unflag an article is not included. Unflagging sort of happens by creating a new version and flagging that one instead. So, once an article has been flagged, it is "in the system". However, initially no article is flagged.
Leaving aside the sighted flag for a moment, what about the quality version flag? Suppose it is given erroneously, because someone made a mistake in checking the sources for the article - this can happen easily. In that case there should be a way to unflag the article, no?
Ulrich
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