[Wikiquality-l] Flagged Revisions too instrusive

[John Erling Blad]

There are several stumbling effects of flagged revs.

The vandalism will have a larger window where it will be observed before
it goes away unnoticed. This is often named probability of detection in
military projects. In the present UI in Wp this is a major problem. The
window is very short and when the vandalism passes out of this window
the chance of detection rapidly drops of to a level given by the reading
frequency of the article. The sighting process will (can) lock the
vandalism in a indefinitely much larger window. This increases the PoD
but will also be the prime reason why people observe that the system
doesn't scale well. That is, the users observe the edits that previously
went away unnoticed.

An other thing closely related to this is an ability to verify several
previous versions in one operation, ie qualifying a new version as
sighted without regard to previous history. This makes the whole process
much more effective then the present method of patrolling. As a
guesstimate this can give a factor of 2-3 times, but limited to how
effective the UI is on conveying the information from the previous edits.

Lastly there are a very odd effect that will emerge if the users that do
patroling/sighting observe the ''unsighted'' versions in a cumulative
way. By marking the versions as sighted they will successive concentrate
on those versions that contains vandalism. This increases the
effectiveness several times, increases the time one unsighted version is
observable and therefore increases PoD.

I believe sighted versions will need fewer patrolers because they will
be more effective, and the result will be articles with less vandalism.
Unfortunatly the system breaks down ungracefully when the patrolers
can't keep up and the vandalism starts to pile up. On the good side the
heap of vandalism can be handled later as long as the heap don't
consistently builds up over some time.

John E
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