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I like the idea, but I think that sighting should be done very liberally, i.e. any non-vandalism version gets sighted. Otherwise, we'll have:
a) Endless reversion wars
b) Very restricted
openness
c) A
cabal of reviewers who can decide "what is truth, what's not"
My proposal, which does not differ significantly from the current version, is:
Does anyone have any ideas or comments? Sala Skan 17:45, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
let me just say first off that i work on both Wikipedia:WikiProject Vandalism studies and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. in terms of vandalism and quality, the editor class and reviewer class helps both projects immensely and would in fact bring a lot more reliability and credibility to Wikipedia. this is in fact a very good idea.
the immediate problem i see however is that Wikipedia under no circumstances should accrue any more classes of users. Administrator, Check User, Bureaucrat - is in my opinion, 2 too many. the last thing we need is to add more to this list. also the last thing we need is having to explain to 100,000 nonactive users why their edit didn't show up in the most recent stable revision. this spawns another RfC like process from complaining users, and we don't need any extra processes either.
like i said, this is a very good idea. it's just the pitfalls and the costs outweigh the benefits, unless someone has a really good way to approach the problems above. i'd love to hear em if they're out there. JoeSmack Talk 19:03, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
(←) Ok, but what is the "cost" in having these classes? You agree that there might be some benefit to vandalism and quality, but what danger do you see that defeat these benefits? -- Merzul 16:11, 10 June 2007 (UTC) More specifically, do you think the editor class is also a bad idea, or is your concern mainly with the reviewer class, or is this objection more general than the specifics of the two classes. -- Merzul 16:44, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Allow me to register my objection as well. It's not just a new editor class, it's a new class whose active involvement is required to make things work. Backlogs on underwatched pages is a major danger. Once a page gets marked by someone in that class, it can become totally stuck until someone from the same class gets around to it again. By contrast, the current RC patrol requires nothing special, even users who aren't logged in can, and do, revert vandalism. Why not just hold edits not made by "autoconfirmed" accounts (the same ones which can't edit semi-protected pages) for 6 hours or something? The FAQ says the whole point of this proposal is to remove the incentive of having vandalism show up immediately, and this accomplishes that in a way that is a) wayyy simpler and b) works with the current RC patrol without requiring extra work from anyone, let alone from a subset of users. -- Abu-Fool Danyal ibn Amir al-Makhiri 18:56, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Merzul, I find your comments very helpful and enlightening. I do believe we have many experts here, but for particular fields there may be only one, or two, or three across the whole Wikipedia. This may be due to the fact that this is an unpaid, volunteer operation. Nevertheless I think we do quite well. There are some glaring lacunae such as, for example, contemporary dance--there don't seem to be many people here, yet, who are knowledgeable and active in this subject--but, of course, as new, knowledgeable editors eventually discover WP then we build that way. We're creating new articles all the time and we each build and maintain in our own areas of expertise. So my answer would be that we do have a great many experts already, working actively. The WikiProjects do help to coordinate efforts though, for similar reasons, many things are still lacking, such as a project to get "dot-on" maps on all city articles. This seems to have been abandoned by the editors who formerly were gung-ho about taking care of it, and we would of course need more Wikipedians to take photos for the articles where FU photos have been eliminated. I believe these types of things to be probably more important than the "policing" functions that seem to be being promoted at the moment. Badagnani 08:52, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
i say we should combine this task with another class. which one I don't know. Arttic00 19:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This is currently rather inconsistent. We used to have editor rights granted automatically based on the 3 criteria, now it is given by admins based on 4 criteria. I think this is a bit weird, I can think of 2 alternatives that make sense, and both seem okay to me:
Also, the current standards seem very high to me, especially since I'm not sure if I am myself particularly "clueful". -- Merzul 23:15, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Is it just for vandalism or is also quality checking? I think a lot of us are wondering this. I also think a lot of us are kind of floating between the two ideas "just vandalism" and "vandalism and quality". We're probably unclear about what exactly this will impact because we're kind of waiting to see how it could be used in actual practice. I ask myself, would I support or oppose this it if was more than just vandalism checking. I honestly don't know, but I'm excited to find out. What I'm trying to get at is, I think some of us are unsure of what exactly to support, because we don't want to write the idea off, but we want to be cautious. A lot of us really want to at least test the concept, in some shape or form, before we can honestly comment on how we should use it. We got this proposal that doesn't really know what it's proposing anymore.
Maybe we should be asking more than one question (do you support this idea or not). Like "Question 1, do you think this would help for vandal fighting" then "Question 2, in addition, do you think some level of quality checking could later apply". Or even "Would you like to see how this works in action before commenting". I find myself at that last example, in that I don't think I can give an accurate response without seeing some kind of indication of what will happen.
What I would love to see is just some kind of test, even if just for a week, so we can actually get our hands on this and really see what we're dealing with. -- Ned Scott 07:02, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
How about giving all readers the option of turning this on or off. Anonymous editors would see the stable version by default, registered users would see the latest version. There could be a small icon somewhere for the version to be switched from recent to stable (e.g. a small tick imposed on an article for stable, and a small clock for most recent). Users could alter this permanently in their preferences. Richard001 03:21, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
If the point of a wiki is to let everyone be able to edit it, flagged revisions whouldn't work. It is like if someone submits a change to make, and then editors must check if the edit is not harmful. But then, WP:BOLD will be rendered useless, because no one's gonna care about being bold if it is reviewed by an admin. Also, that whould create an HUGE backlog of articles. I think we are better the way we already are.- Flubeca (t) 19:28, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
I support the general idea of stable versions. Though, instead of require all articles and changes to be approved, how about some time-delay mechanism. Changes from newbies or anons. don't go live immediately, but there is a time delay. (so many minutes or some other amount of time) I'm not sure one particular amount of time is suitable for all articles. Right now we have semi-protected articles and non-protected articles. Maybe one length of time be applied to what currently are semi-protected articles and another time length for non-protected articles. And, users logged in would see the live version no matter what. A time delay would allow us to flag vandalism, but non-vandalism edits would go through. Don't want this to be overly complicated. Also, having some sort of filter, like User:MartinBot, is helpful. Though would be good if bad edits (as determined by whatever filter MartinBot uses) were delayed, rather than go live and then reverted. If an edit has blanked a page (or deleted large portions), it needs to be checked or delayed. If an edit includes naughty words, it must be checked, etc. I'm not sure of specifics, but some sort of stable version or time delay would be a good thing for Wikipedia, to help reduce instant gratification that vandals get from seeing their edits go live immediately. -- Aude ( talk) 19:55, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
"Users who have been around for some time can be granted (possibly automatically) rights that would let them review page revisions."
Initially I read "let them review page revisions" to mean let them click on the History tab, look at the list of edits, and click on them to view an earlier version - the implication then being that others could not do any of these things. Reading further I gather that "review" here means something rather more than this (i.e. checking the article and flagging it). Maybe that could be made clearer in the sentence quoted? Matt 00:54, 24 June 2007 (UTC).
Additional point: I also don't really understand the significance of the sentence: "The crucial issue here is that all registered users will see and edit the most recent version of a page." "Crucial issue" makes it sound like this is a central component of the new proposals, but isn't this just what happens at the moment? Should it read "The crucial issue here is that all registered users will continue to see and edit the most recent version of a page."? But even this kind of implies that non-registered users won't edit the most recent version, whereas surely they will have to? Matt 01:15, 24 June 2007 (UTC)~.
Probably this has already been mentioned (apologies, I haven't read all the above!). One thing that troubles me about this proposal is the length of time it might take before good edits are reviewed and made the version that people see by default. I can see worthwhile additions and corrections languishing unreviewed for months and months. Would there be some mechanism for flagging up edits needing review, and would there be enough editors to cope with the volume? Matt 00:54, 24 June 2007 (UTC).
Search engines were mentioned above in #Major choice, because search engines are anonymous users. I point out that Wikipedia's servers are aware of at least some search engines (such as in feeding changes to them). Should an attempt be made to treat search engines differently than anon readers? An advantage to Wikipedia is a better reputation by presenting higher quality articles to searchers. To avoid Wikipedia deciding how to treat this type of user, maybe search engine crawlers could request the article flag level when asking for an article. The flag type option then could be used by crawler programmers to use if they wish to, and articles for anonymous users who don't request a certain flag type would use the anon default behavior. ( SEWilco 17:35, 24 June 2007 (UTC))
Actually, I wouldn't want search engines to go to the current version, since that would somewhat defeat the purpose of spam prevention, as linkspammers could freely edit an article and have their links show up in search engines, regardless of being sighted or not. Dr. Cash 05:33, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Can we start a trial with a few pages and see how it goes? Tom Harrison Talk 15:40, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I reorganized the main page to separate out the two different levels of flagged reviewing that we've been discussing here. I tried to include some of the points on which there seems to be a consensus and fix up some of the prose without changing the meaning. But mostly I wanted to put everything relating to "sighting" together and everything relating to "quality" together.
If I added anything that seems incorrect on the basis of discussions here, please change it back--please assume that any incorrect change probably reflects my lack of understanding of some aspect of the project rather than an attempt to put my POV in the article. Best, -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 20:24, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
If the quality status is granted by one person, isn't that against Wikipedia:Consensus? - Flubeca (t) 18:38, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
I whould like that some mods be integrated:
- Flubeca Talk 18:36, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
The current proposal says the software will grant it to anyone which an account over 60 days old, 500 edits, and an email address confirmed. This seems to be awfully low as far as requirements go to grant someone the ability to chose what page readers will see. This ability will affect what readers who don't know about the behind scene work will see. I don't think this ability should just be given out based on three requirements. A user could easily have 500 edits and a two month old sleeper account and could flag a page. I think we should have high requirements (1000 edits?) or a simple process for granting it. Just an idea. ~ Wikihermit 00:57, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
I've read over this, and have various thoghts/suggestions/agreements, but to make them all in the relevant threaded place would seem a little chaotic, so I'm making them all here.
That sort of summarises my views, informed by what I've read and my own experiences... take what you will... SamBC 22:30, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Sooner or later, we'll need to switch from the current talk page- and bot-based article assessment system (Stub, Start, B, GA, A, FA) to one that is managed through flagged revisions. It's not necessarily something we want to do at the beginning (then again, maybe it is). But when that happens, we should probably put some effort into rethinking the assessment system itself. At the minimum, we need a new class between Start and B; there's an enormous range that can qualify as Start, and not much consistency in how well-developed an article must be before it meets B standards. Also, with the way GA has evolved, increasingly a mini-FA process, the A class is basically useless.
A more interesting possibility is to create distinct rating categories for 1) completeness and formatting, 2) prose and picture content, and 3) sourcing.
When a fuller rating system happens, will it be better to have "sighted" and "quality" as a separate rating category, or should the fuller rating system supersede the none/sighted/quality ratings (under the assumption that any rated version is sighted, and a high-rated article is synonymous with quality)?-- ragesoss 03:28, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
Hello -- First, thanks to "Voice of All" for comments and participation; I (and perhaps others?) did not realize that one of the programmers of the extension was actively reading and contributing to this page and the project page. It's a big boast to the energy of people trying to give comments/think through scenarios to know that a developer is listening.
Perhaps this is better on the Extension talk, since it involves quite a bit of programming, but it's also a culture questions, so this might be good too. For the "Reviewer" right, is it possible to make it a category specific right? I know that changes what is currently a bool into an array, possibly another table, etc., but it might be something really important to think about. For instance, I am not an administrator and I definitely don't think that the "reviewer" right in general would be at all appropriate. But I am a prof. of Medieval music, so I think I could improve WP by identifying particularly good and stable versions as a reviewer in that category. Could the software accommodate this type of specificity?
The advantage of using article categories is that they are already there and they organize well into overlapping groupings. The largest objection to using them is that of course I could add [[Category:Medieval Music]] to " Mario Cuomo", deface the article, and then slap a quality tag on it. I think though that like admins abusing their powers, this type of change would be reverted quickly by calling an admin or other reviewer, and my reviewer right would be taken away just as quickly (probably along with Editor, etc.).
Just some thoughts. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 20:15, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
This question has probably been answered before, but I haven't read it. What happens if an edit is vandalism? Can editors, or reviewers "delete" that revision, in the sense that they have marked it as "Unreadable", or vandalism? It seems to me, that having the little box at the top of the page saying "One revision to be checked", when the revision to be checked is vandalism, would be a little weird, because the reviewer (or Editor) can't mark it as a "bad" revision, can they?
Second Question, would edits made by users with "Editor" or "Reviewer" status be automatically flagged as Sighted, similar to the Patrol function? (Not enabled on Wikipedia) GrooveDog ( talk) 15:52, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm curious how flagged revisions differs at this point from the German stable versions system. What details are different? I think I understand but I'd like to see this set forth by someone who's been closely involved. Also wondering whether we have a firm date yet for implementation. Durova Charge! 16:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
I recommend "Reviewer rights." ← Ben B4 08:10, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
So what can we use then? Referee or editor seem the only remaining suggestions. Richard001 23:14, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
Agree. Editor is too broad a term and Reviewer is more suitable for the high quality level of articles. How about "Inspector" or "Scrutinizer", in line with my suggestions below for replacing the discriminatory "Sighted" term. Hu 21:02, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I admit to being confused! The last thing we need is new jargon. If we are talking about an editor who is trusted to have a few extra permissions/priviledges we are talking about a trusted editor. ClemRutter 18:27, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Is there some technical reason why this has not been implemented yet? If not, why not just start now with the policy as given on the current page (unchanged for two months) and see how it pans out? It seems a blatantly obvious improvement, the only argument being how to fine-tune it to get the best results, which can be done after it goes live. The franchise for automatic "editor" status is pretty tight (almost as tight as for Foundation board elections) so it will certainly exclude common-or-garden vandals. I'd be happy to see a smaller edit count required, but the main thing is to get going. The worst that can happen is that too trigger-happy sighting freezes up a lot of pages as seen by the outside world, as suggested by some commentators above. IF that turns out to be a problem it can be solved by extending the franchise by reducing the number of edits required. But it shouldn't be necessary if we ask people only to sight pages on their watch list, at least at first. (We probably need a "Please sight this page" noticeboard as well).
As for reviewed status, there obviously needs to be a debate about how reviewer power is awarded and how it should be applied. It can be trialled by initially restricting to new FAs and FAs which pass FAR, with "reviewer" status initially given to the admins who close the debates (I doubt they would over-use it since Raul654 is a strong advocate of allowing edits by anyone). PaddyLeahy 13:21, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
Of the two proposals presented here I would somewhat support the quality proposal. With the sighted revisions proposal, no one can see the vandalism. However, nobody except "editors" can see any constructive edit an anonymous user makes until a cabal of "editors" approves it. Anonymous users are editors and real people as well. With this proposal vandalism still needs to be reverted. Except with this, the vandalism won't be noticed until a logged in user comes along and reads the article, since the former vandalism patrol will be too busy "approving" typo fixes. I believe the first proposal goes against the spirit of Wikipedia. The second one does as well, but it can be justified. If we do go ahead with the second one we'll need to do it in a way that doesn't add another class of users. I would prefer a system where any two or three users could approve an edit to a featured article. If they can't reach unanimous consensus the edit will be reverted and the issue brought up on the talk page.
There's always going to be bad edits. To me, this system is like slapping a semi-protected notice on every article that's been "sighted". When an article is semi-protected an anon has to ask for an edit to be made. If an article is "sighted" the anon can make the edit, but 99% of the world can't see it until a "superior editor" says that the edit is good enough. I unfortunately cannot use the phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I can assure you that Wikipedia will be broken by this proposal more than it will be by immature vandalism that quickly gets reverted. Psych less 20:49, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
I have a thought regarding the current version. As I understand it, the recent 'confirmed' revision gets shown to the anons and Joe Public, and the current version to proven editors (although this may be an optional setting?).
What would happen if the 'current' version was not automatically shown to the proven editors (unless there is no recorded quality revision for an article)? In this way any proven editor who is just browsing/researching - believe it or not, it still happens - will still be sure of a non-vandalised version and would also be prompted to approve the recent edits (removing any backlog situation, and confirming any genuine edits that may not be displayed for a length of time.
Am I right in thinking that this extension would be automatically installed across the wiki? If so, may I suggest that the default setting is for everyone to see the quality version, with the option for proven editors to choose to see the most recent? This would allow the browsers-who-edit-occasionally to be sure of a good revision, and encourage the editors-who-browse-occasionally to check the recent edits and 'up' the flagged revision to a newer one.
Anyway, please discuss. – MDCollins ( talk) 23:26, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
Citizendium and the German Wikipedia have both tried this. Does anyone know how those projects have faired with there different systems? How are the problems encountered in their systems been taken care of with this system? Don’t get me wrong, I too long for the day when it will be flaggers vs. anti-flaggers instead of deletionists vs inclusionists, but let’s not rush into this without learning from previous attempts.-- Rayc 02:30, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I'll go on record in support of this, mainly because of conversations with non-Wikipedians. The vast majority of people who visit this site are looking for reliable information, period. Their major concern is whether the articles they read have been corrupted. Anyone who desires to go beyond that to the nuts-and-bolts of wiki editing can do so, so this is win-win. Not perfect, perhaps, but far better than what we have. Let's go for it. Durova Charge! 04:58, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I support implementing these policies as soon as possible. Kaldari 22:23, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I support this in theory, but viewing a non-current page by default goes against the whole spirit of a wiki. A huge number of good contributions come from non-logged in users, and while this proposal will not prevent them from contributing, it seems inevitable that it will confuse. This in particular: "users who are not logged in may not see the most recent version of a page by default, but will always edit the most recent version." That’s just asking for trouble. Perhaps there should be a reverse of this idea, so that all users see the current version, but there is an option to view a reviewed history version. Think outside the box 13:00, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
(outdent) I see the legitimate side of this objection and I think it can be addressed through communication and outreach. Durova Charge! 06:33, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
It would probably be a fairly minor change to the software so that once a reader has made an edit they are sent to the most recent (non-stable) version of the page for the rest of their browsing session. This would substantially reduce the 'wtf my edit is gone' factor. -- Gmaxwell 18:35, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
We need a better term than "Sighted". The implication is that blind users are excluded. Further, there is no explanation of what the term derives from or means exactly and I am at a loss to imagine how or why it was chosen. Why not call it "Presentable" or "Reviewed" or "Inspected" or "Examined" or "Scrutinized"? Of these, the first, "Presentable" is the lowest level and probably the most appropriate term because it connotes the least amount (none) of fact-checking.
As an aside, I would suggest at least two editors and possibly three to inspect an article before it gains this status, otherwise it becomes another way for a single editor with an agenda to have an oversized impact on Wikipedia. Collusion is not likely to be a problem for more than a couple of articles because it becomes possible to compare edits and see patterns if collusion exists. Hu 20:57, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I do get the core reason why we are doing this. We're trying to combat vandalism and other thing. Heck, I've got a proposal of my own to combat vandalism. I have heard about this idea (patrolled edits) before, and I think it was tested on the de.wp before (?). But I think more than any other proposal I've seen, this is in great contradiction to the spirit of Wikipedia. WP is an ever moving and changing encyclopedia. When you edit something it goes live the second after you press save. There are a couple reason I don't like this proposal:
People may not like it, but those are my reasons. But then again, what do I know? I'm just a reader, editor, administrator. - Royalguard11( T· R!) 02:11, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
In light of my recent comments I feel I should state my ideas on how this proposal should work. I feel that the featured articles process could be improved. The featured and good article processes are a way to assure the reader that the article they are reading is of the highest quality. I believe there should be two processes, to simply give them names I will call them: Highest Quality and High Quality. High Quality articles will be subject to the FA criteria, excluding criterion 1a. I believe that engaging prose is not what most readers are looking for in a quality article. An article can have an average level of prose and still be high quality. People nitpick about prose at FAC, but rarely help fix it. Highest Quality articles will be subject to all of the FA criteria and the article must be examined by a subject expert. The definition of subject expert will require much debate, I am certain. I believe that High Quality articles should have a silver star at the top of the article, giving a short explanation of the High Quality process. Highest Quality articles would have a golden star, and one or more green checkmarks. The checkmarks would say when you hover over them: This article has been as being factually correct and comprehensive by [subject expert's name]. The link would go to a page that tells about the subject expert and their examination of the article.
How does this fit into the proposal? Well, I completely disagree with the sighted version proposal. I've stated my disagreements with it elsewhere. High and Highest Quality articles will be granted the quality status by administrators and bureaucrats after they have passed the processes. When a user has the quality version open, and they click edit, a message will explain that they may be editing a different revision of the page than the quality one. It will also say the changes they make will only show on the "current revision" page. Every month a process would determine whether the current revision is an improvement of the article. Some changes to the current revision may need to be made for it to pass. Any editor can request that the current revision be compared to the quality revision, up to once a week for Highest Quality articles and up to once every three days for High Quality articles.
These are my ideas. Since this proposal is likely going to go through one way or another let's focus on assuring quality. Psych less 03:58, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Looking forward to implementation. This will fix ALOT of problems, but it needs to be done right. The controls on who gets to mark revisions approved are absolutely crucial. -- CBD 13:26, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Thought of several more things;
-- CBD 22:23, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
CBD makes some great points -- as we go further down the list I agree with more and more of them. The possibility that a puppet master would give the right to a ton of sockpuppets is rather disturbing, even though in general I like the version where surveyors can give the sighting permission to other surveyors. We may need a tool to identify and fix this problem--will there be a way for editors (or at least admins) to see to whom an editor has given this privilege? Tieing the ability to edit semi-protected pages, create new articles, etc., to surveyors seems reasonable since as CBD points out it requires the same general understanding of WP and Mediawiki as we'd expect from surveyors. Point #2 is also important to reduce confusion.
BTW -- it sounds like we've definitely committed to a two-stage rollout with the anti-vandal stage (sighting) being the major point under discussion now and Reviewing/Quality being placed on the back burner? I think the project page should be updated to reflect that. Best, -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 18:06, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Hello,
I'm the point of contact from the WMF Board on flagged revisions for the time being. I will discuss our deployment strategy next week with Sue Gardner, who is currently heading WMF operations. To clarify, nothing is set into stone yet, and we want the community to be part of the process every step of the way.
It is likely that the next thing that will happen is a very public beta test of the extension on a dedicated test wiki, with a call to developers to systematically improve the usability and scalability of the extension. After that, my recommendation will be that each wiki community is given the choice to deploy this extension or not, with a clearly defined process for making a decision to do so.
Regarding the deployment parameters, my personal opinion is that it would be foolish to immediately set the extension to always show the last "sighted" revision to unregistered users. When we do not yet know whether the sighting of revisions will scale, immediately changing the default of all pages could massively impact usability of day-to-day users and new contributors. I also suspect that there are significant usability problems with showing different revisions to registered and unregistered users.
Unfortunately, the extension does not support setting the default view on a per-page level yet. With that functionality, it would be possible to organically expand the number of pages whose default view is the last "sighted" revision. Without that functionality in place, I would be reluctant to change the default view at all.
But this is just my recommendation, and if the en.wp community feels that we should roll out the extension with the default view changed for all users, this is what will happen. It may make sense to have a poll on various aspects of the configuration at the end of the public beta.-- Eloquence * 19:17, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
If this system is to be adopted, considerable thought needs to be given to making sure that good-faith contributors who haven't registered or are newbies don't feel that their contributions are disappearing into a black hole. The problem of recruitment & retention of knowledgeable editors is, I believe, as acute as that of controlling vandalism, and the proposed change would seem to run the risk of controlling one at the cost of severely exacerbating the other.
This would probably need to include an explicit message on saving that the edits have been accepted but won't be publicly visible until they've been sighted by an experienced editor, efforts on the part of all the WikiProjects &c to sight revisions to the articles under their umbrella extremely rapidly -- preferably within hours, and a noticeboard for non-sight-privileged editors to bring edits that have languished for more than, say, 48 hours. Espresso Addict 23:26, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
The way that I read this proposal, edits made to an article would not appear to most users until they have been Sighted. Is that correct? If so, it seems to be me that we don't have the manpower to constantly be sighting revisions, and the backlog of unsighted revisions would make it so that the newest version of many articles would be unviewable for a fairly long amount of time. I would be more inclined to support this proposal if revisions appeared immediately without being sighted, at which time the default version shown to unregistered users would be the most current version. Then, a user could sight a revision, and that would become the new default.-- Danaman5 16:39, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Jitse, your argument about good articles becoming degraded over time applies well to the "quality versions" section of this proposal. It is indeed tough when someone improves an article to good or featured status and then sees it degraded. That's why I support the quality versions portion of the plan. However, I believe that the sighted versions portion goes too far, in that it makes every edit a hassle. If we want to retain experts, we have to find a middle ground, where they know that their valuable contributions will not be degraded, but also that they can build the article up from a stub without too much trouble.-- Danaman5 04:33, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
Many, perhaps most, valid edits are minor things - grammar, formatting, categorisation, simple factual updates etc - and all of those edits would be more hassle if this was implemented. Therefore I believe that is would hamstring the whole project by reducing the amount of such good edits. There is an underlying false assumption that articles reach a point where they don't need much more editing - many of the most trafficked articles cover rapidly changing subjects that need to be updated a great deal. Baridiah 22:05, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
Could someone who knows about how Mediawiki merges stuff comment on this. I have this vague recollection that I once edited a section of a page and someone inserted very rude vandalism by editing a different section. This went unnoticed for quite some time, I assume because other people thought I had checked the previous edit.
Is this possible that he inserted this at the same time as I was editing the page and then the software merged our edits? In any case, this vandalism went unnoticed for a very long time, and when I noticed it, I was searching the edit history to find the idiot who had let such blatant vandalism into the article. I was quite embarrassed when I saw that I had edited immediately after the vandal.... I like to think that this was merged, but perhaps I was just sloppy.
In any case, I'm a bit afraid of the auto-sighting idea, and so I made some bold edits to the proposal. I hope other people will be equally bold in fixing this stuff, if my fears are not well founded.
Cheers, Merzul 12:08, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
See my proposal on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). It was a proposal similar to this, but it also proposed that links be available on official policy pages to the revisions that became policy, so that if the content of the policy is changed without consent or universal knowledge, this can be discovered and not mistaken to be the originally agreed-upon policy.-- 64.149.189.119 19:05, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
Please say whether you support or oppose this proposal. Eyu100( t| fr| Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 15:50, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
"Yes" to a review process and stable versions, but "no" to the suggested implementation here, a "Reviewer" (or "Surveyor") user class with special power over content.
Heres my two cents worth. When my 5 year old jumps on and simply deletes things on wikipedia, creating work for others to revert, I think just by placing this simple criteria saves a lot of inadvertent mistakes, time, and introduces some form of accountability and traceability. all the best. -- T3Smile 17:23, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
There should never be a system where one particular version is "the right version" (i.e. a "quality" version.) We need to acknowledge that consensus can -- and will -- change, and sometimes, it will change drastically. The idea of having a "stable version" to work off of shifts the preference toward past consensus instead of future consensus. Not only is this just a bad idea because of the inevitably contentious nature of the system, it will also go against the Wikipedia philosophy. .V. Talk| Email 17:35, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
I like the idea, but I think that sighting should be done very liberally, i.e. any non-vandalism version gets sighted. Otherwise, we'll have:
a) Endless reversion wars
b) Very restricted
openness
c) A
cabal of reviewers who can decide "what is truth, what's not"
My proposal, which does not differ significantly from the current version, is:
Does anyone have any ideas or comments? Sala Skan 17:45, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
let me just say first off that i work on both Wikipedia:WikiProject Vandalism studies and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. in terms of vandalism and quality, the editor class and reviewer class helps both projects immensely and would in fact bring a lot more reliability and credibility to Wikipedia. this is in fact a very good idea.
the immediate problem i see however is that Wikipedia under no circumstances should accrue any more classes of users. Administrator, Check User, Bureaucrat - is in my opinion, 2 too many. the last thing we need is to add more to this list. also the last thing we need is having to explain to 100,000 nonactive users why their edit didn't show up in the most recent stable revision. this spawns another RfC like process from complaining users, and we don't need any extra processes either.
like i said, this is a very good idea. it's just the pitfalls and the costs outweigh the benefits, unless someone has a really good way to approach the problems above. i'd love to hear em if they're out there. JoeSmack Talk 19:03, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
(←) Ok, but what is the "cost" in having these classes? You agree that there might be some benefit to vandalism and quality, but what danger do you see that defeat these benefits? -- Merzul 16:11, 10 June 2007 (UTC) More specifically, do you think the editor class is also a bad idea, or is your concern mainly with the reviewer class, or is this objection more general than the specifics of the two classes. -- Merzul 16:44, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Allow me to register my objection as well. It's not just a new editor class, it's a new class whose active involvement is required to make things work. Backlogs on underwatched pages is a major danger. Once a page gets marked by someone in that class, it can become totally stuck until someone from the same class gets around to it again. By contrast, the current RC patrol requires nothing special, even users who aren't logged in can, and do, revert vandalism. Why not just hold edits not made by "autoconfirmed" accounts (the same ones which can't edit semi-protected pages) for 6 hours or something? The FAQ says the whole point of this proposal is to remove the incentive of having vandalism show up immediately, and this accomplishes that in a way that is a) wayyy simpler and b) works with the current RC patrol without requiring extra work from anyone, let alone from a subset of users. -- Abu-Fool Danyal ibn Amir al-Makhiri 18:56, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Merzul, I find your comments very helpful and enlightening. I do believe we have many experts here, but for particular fields there may be only one, or two, or three across the whole Wikipedia. This may be due to the fact that this is an unpaid, volunteer operation. Nevertheless I think we do quite well. There are some glaring lacunae such as, for example, contemporary dance--there don't seem to be many people here, yet, who are knowledgeable and active in this subject--but, of course, as new, knowledgeable editors eventually discover WP then we build that way. We're creating new articles all the time and we each build and maintain in our own areas of expertise. So my answer would be that we do have a great many experts already, working actively. The WikiProjects do help to coordinate efforts though, for similar reasons, many things are still lacking, such as a project to get "dot-on" maps on all city articles. This seems to have been abandoned by the editors who formerly were gung-ho about taking care of it, and we would of course need more Wikipedians to take photos for the articles where FU photos have been eliminated. I believe these types of things to be probably more important than the "policing" functions that seem to be being promoted at the moment. Badagnani 08:52, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
i say we should combine this task with another class. which one I don't know. Arttic00 19:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This is currently rather inconsistent. We used to have editor rights granted automatically based on the 3 criteria, now it is given by admins based on 4 criteria. I think this is a bit weird, I can think of 2 alternatives that make sense, and both seem okay to me:
Also, the current standards seem very high to me, especially since I'm not sure if I am myself particularly "clueful". -- Merzul 23:15, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Is it just for vandalism or is also quality checking? I think a lot of us are wondering this. I also think a lot of us are kind of floating between the two ideas "just vandalism" and "vandalism and quality". We're probably unclear about what exactly this will impact because we're kind of waiting to see how it could be used in actual practice. I ask myself, would I support or oppose this it if was more than just vandalism checking. I honestly don't know, but I'm excited to find out. What I'm trying to get at is, I think some of us are unsure of what exactly to support, because we don't want to write the idea off, but we want to be cautious. A lot of us really want to at least test the concept, in some shape or form, before we can honestly comment on how we should use it. We got this proposal that doesn't really know what it's proposing anymore.
Maybe we should be asking more than one question (do you support this idea or not). Like "Question 1, do you think this would help for vandal fighting" then "Question 2, in addition, do you think some level of quality checking could later apply". Or even "Would you like to see how this works in action before commenting". I find myself at that last example, in that I don't think I can give an accurate response without seeing some kind of indication of what will happen.
What I would love to see is just some kind of test, even if just for a week, so we can actually get our hands on this and really see what we're dealing with. -- Ned Scott 07:02, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
How about giving all readers the option of turning this on or off. Anonymous editors would see the stable version by default, registered users would see the latest version. There could be a small icon somewhere for the version to be switched from recent to stable (e.g. a small tick imposed on an article for stable, and a small clock for most recent). Users could alter this permanently in their preferences. Richard001 03:21, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
If the point of a wiki is to let everyone be able to edit it, flagged revisions whouldn't work. It is like if someone submits a change to make, and then editors must check if the edit is not harmful. But then, WP:BOLD will be rendered useless, because no one's gonna care about being bold if it is reviewed by an admin. Also, that whould create an HUGE backlog of articles. I think we are better the way we already are.- Flubeca (t) 19:28, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
I support the general idea of stable versions. Though, instead of require all articles and changes to be approved, how about some time-delay mechanism. Changes from newbies or anons. don't go live immediately, but there is a time delay. (so many minutes or some other amount of time) I'm not sure one particular amount of time is suitable for all articles. Right now we have semi-protected articles and non-protected articles. Maybe one length of time be applied to what currently are semi-protected articles and another time length for non-protected articles. And, users logged in would see the live version no matter what. A time delay would allow us to flag vandalism, but non-vandalism edits would go through. Don't want this to be overly complicated. Also, having some sort of filter, like User:MartinBot, is helpful. Though would be good if bad edits (as determined by whatever filter MartinBot uses) were delayed, rather than go live and then reverted. If an edit has blanked a page (or deleted large portions), it needs to be checked or delayed. If an edit includes naughty words, it must be checked, etc. I'm not sure of specifics, but some sort of stable version or time delay would be a good thing for Wikipedia, to help reduce instant gratification that vandals get from seeing their edits go live immediately. -- Aude ( talk) 19:55, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
"Users who have been around for some time can be granted (possibly automatically) rights that would let them review page revisions."
Initially I read "let them review page revisions" to mean let them click on the History tab, look at the list of edits, and click on them to view an earlier version - the implication then being that others could not do any of these things. Reading further I gather that "review" here means something rather more than this (i.e. checking the article and flagging it). Maybe that could be made clearer in the sentence quoted? Matt 00:54, 24 June 2007 (UTC).
Additional point: I also don't really understand the significance of the sentence: "The crucial issue here is that all registered users will see and edit the most recent version of a page." "Crucial issue" makes it sound like this is a central component of the new proposals, but isn't this just what happens at the moment? Should it read "The crucial issue here is that all registered users will continue to see and edit the most recent version of a page."? But even this kind of implies that non-registered users won't edit the most recent version, whereas surely they will have to? Matt 01:15, 24 June 2007 (UTC)~.
Probably this has already been mentioned (apologies, I haven't read all the above!). One thing that troubles me about this proposal is the length of time it might take before good edits are reviewed and made the version that people see by default. I can see worthwhile additions and corrections languishing unreviewed for months and months. Would there be some mechanism for flagging up edits needing review, and would there be enough editors to cope with the volume? Matt 00:54, 24 June 2007 (UTC).
Search engines were mentioned above in #Major choice, because search engines are anonymous users. I point out that Wikipedia's servers are aware of at least some search engines (such as in feeding changes to them). Should an attempt be made to treat search engines differently than anon readers? An advantage to Wikipedia is a better reputation by presenting higher quality articles to searchers. To avoid Wikipedia deciding how to treat this type of user, maybe search engine crawlers could request the article flag level when asking for an article. The flag type option then could be used by crawler programmers to use if they wish to, and articles for anonymous users who don't request a certain flag type would use the anon default behavior. ( SEWilco 17:35, 24 June 2007 (UTC))
Actually, I wouldn't want search engines to go to the current version, since that would somewhat defeat the purpose of spam prevention, as linkspammers could freely edit an article and have their links show up in search engines, regardless of being sighted or not. Dr. Cash 05:33, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Can we start a trial with a few pages and see how it goes? Tom Harrison Talk 15:40, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I reorganized the main page to separate out the two different levels of flagged reviewing that we've been discussing here. I tried to include some of the points on which there seems to be a consensus and fix up some of the prose without changing the meaning. But mostly I wanted to put everything relating to "sighting" together and everything relating to "quality" together.
If I added anything that seems incorrect on the basis of discussions here, please change it back--please assume that any incorrect change probably reflects my lack of understanding of some aspect of the project rather than an attempt to put my POV in the article. Best, -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 20:24, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
If the quality status is granted by one person, isn't that against Wikipedia:Consensus? - Flubeca (t) 18:38, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
I whould like that some mods be integrated:
- Flubeca Talk 18:36, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
The current proposal says the software will grant it to anyone which an account over 60 days old, 500 edits, and an email address confirmed. This seems to be awfully low as far as requirements go to grant someone the ability to chose what page readers will see. This ability will affect what readers who don't know about the behind scene work will see. I don't think this ability should just be given out based on three requirements. A user could easily have 500 edits and a two month old sleeper account and could flag a page. I think we should have high requirements (1000 edits?) or a simple process for granting it. Just an idea. ~ Wikihermit 00:57, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
I've read over this, and have various thoghts/suggestions/agreements, but to make them all in the relevant threaded place would seem a little chaotic, so I'm making them all here.
That sort of summarises my views, informed by what I've read and my own experiences... take what you will... SamBC 22:30, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Sooner or later, we'll need to switch from the current talk page- and bot-based article assessment system (Stub, Start, B, GA, A, FA) to one that is managed through flagged revisions. It's not necessarily something we want to do at the beginning (then again, maybe it is). But when that happens, we should probably put some effort into rethinking the assessment system itself. At the minimum, we need a new class between Start and B; there's an enormous range that can qualify as Start, and not much consistency in how well-developed an article must be before it meets B standards. Also, with the way GA has evolved, increasingly a mini-FA process, the A class is basically useless.
A more interesting possibility is to create distinct rating categories for 1) completeness and formatting, 2) prose and picture content, and 3) sourcing.
When a fuller rating system happens, will it be better to have "sighted" and "quality" as a separate rating category, or should the fuller rating system supersede the none/sighted/quality ratings (under the assumption that any rated version is sighted, and a high-rated article is synonymous with quality)?-- ragesoss 03:28, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
Hello -- First, thanks to "Voice of All" for comments and participation; I (and perhaps others?) did not realize that one of the programmers of the extension was actively reading and contributing to this page and the project page. It's a big boast to the energy of people trying to give comments/think through scenarios to know that a developer is listening.
Perhaps this is better on the Extension talk, since it involves quite a bit of programming, but it's also a culture questions, so this might be good too. For the "Reviewer" right, is it possible to make it a category specific right? I know that changes what is currently a bool into an array, possibly another table, etc., but it might be something really important to think about. For instance, I am not an administrator and I definitely don't think that the "reviewer" right in general would be at all appropriate. But I am a prof. of Medieval music, so I think I could improve WP by identifying particularly good and stable versions as a reviewer in that category. Could the software accommodate this type of specificity?
The advantage of using article categories is that they are already there and they organize well into overlapping groupings. The largest objection to using them is that of course I could add [[Category:Medieval Music]] to " Mario Cuomo", deface the article, and then slap a quality tag on it. I think though that like admins abusing their powers, this type of change would be reverted quickly by calling an admin or other reviewer, and my reviewer right would be taken away just as quickly (probably along with Editor, etc.).
Just some thoughts. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 20:15, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
This question has probably been answered before, but I haven't read it. What happens if an edit is vandalism? Can editors, or reviewers "delete" that revision, in the sense that they have marked it as "Unreadable", or vandalism? It seems to me, that having the little box at the top of the page saying "One revision to be checked", when the revision to be checked is vandalism, would be a little weird, because the reviewer (or Editor) can't mark it as a "bad" revision, can they?
Second Question, would edits made by users with "Editor" or "Reviewer" status be automatically flagged as Sighted, similar to the Patrol function? (Not enabled on Wikipedia) GrooveDog ( talk) 15:52, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm curious how flagged revisions differs at this point from the German stable versions system. What details are different? I think I understand but I'd like to see this set forth by someone who's been closely involved. Also wondering whether we have a firm date yet for implementation. Durova Charge! 16:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
I recommend "Reviewer rights." ← Ben B4 08:10, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
So what can we use then? Referee or editor seem the only remaining suggestions. Richard001 23:14, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
Agree. Editor is too broad a term and Reviewer is more suitable for the high quality level of articles. How about "Inspector" or "Scrutinizer", in line with my suggestions below for replacing the discriminatory "Sighted" term. Hu 21:02, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I admit to being confused! The last thing we need is new jargon. If we are talking about an editor who is trusted to have a few extra permissions/priviledges we are talking about a trusted editor. ClemRutter 18:27, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Is there some technical reason why this has not been implemented yet? If not, why not just start now with the policy as given on the current page (unchanged for two months) and see how it pans out? It seems a blatantly obvious improvement, the only argument being how to fine-tune it to get the best results, which can be done after it goes live. The franchise for automatic "editor" status is pretty tight (almost as tight as for Foundation board elections) so it will certainly exclude common-or-garden vandals. I'd be happy to see a smaller edit count required, but the main thing is to get going. The worst that can happen is that too trigger-happy sighting freezes up a lot of pages as seen by the outside world, as suggested by some commentators above. IF that turns out to be a problem it can be solved by extending the franchise by reducing the number of edits required. But it shouldn't be necessary if we ask people only to sight pages on their watch list, at least at first. (We probably need a "Please sight this page" noticeboard as well).
As for reviewed status, there obviously needs to be a debate about how reviewer power is awarded and how it should be applied. It can be trialled by initially restricting to new FAs and FAs which pass FAR, with "reviewer" status initially given to the admins who close the debates (I doubt they would over-use it since Raul654 is a strong advocate of allowing edits by anyone). PaddyLeahy 13:21, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
Of the two proposals presented here I would somewhat support the quality proposal. With the sighted revisions proposal, no one can see the vandalism. However, nobody except "editors" can see any constructive edit an anonymous user makes until a cabal of "editors" approves it. Anonymous users are editors and real people as well. With this proposal vandalism still needs to be reverted. Except with this, the vandalism won't be noticed until a logged in user comes along and reads the article, since the former vandalism patrol will be too busy "approving" typo fixes. I believe the first proposal goes against the spirit of Wikipedia. The second one does as well, but it can be justified. If we do go ahead with the second one we'll need to do it in a way that doesn't add another class of users. I would prefer a system where any two or three users could approve an edit to a featured article. If they can't reach unanimous consensus the edit will be reverted and the issue brought up on the talk page.
There's always going to be bad edits. To me, this system is like slapping a semi-protected notice on every article that's been "sighted". When an article is semi-protected an anon has to ask for an edit to be made. If an article is "sighted" the anon can make the edit, but 99% of the world can't see it until a "superior editor" says that the edit is good enough. I unfortunately cannot use the phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I can assure you that Wikipedia will be broken by this proposal more than it will be by immature vandalism that quickly gets reverted. Psych less 20:49, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
I have a thought regarding the current version. As I understand it, the recent 'confirmed' revision gets shown to the anons and Joe Public, and the current version to proven editors (although this may be an optional setting?).
What would happen if the 'current' version was not automatically shown to the proven editors (unless there is no recorded quality revision for an article)? In this way any proven editor who is just browsing/researching - believe it or not, it still happens - will still be sure of a non-vandalised version and would also be prompted to approve the recent edits (removing any backlog situation, and confirming any genuine edits that may not be displayed for a length of time.
Am I right in thinking that this extension would be automatically installed across the wiki? If so, may I suggest that the default setting is for everyone to see the quality version, with the option for proven editors to choose to see the most recent? This would allow the browsers-who-edit-occasionally to be sure of a good revision, and encourage the editors-who-browse-occasionally to check the recent edits and 'up' the flagged revision to a newer one.
Anyway, please discuss. – MDCollins ( talk) 23:26, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
Citizendium and the German Wikipedia have both tried this. Does anyone know how those projects have faired with there different systems? How are the problems encountered in their systems been taken care of with this system? Don’t get me wrong, I too long for the day when it will be flaggers vs. anti-flaggers instead of deletionists vs inclusionists, but let’s not rush into this without learning from previous attempts.-- Rayc 02:30, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I'll go on record in support of this, mainly because of conversations with non-Wikipedians. The vast majority of people who visit this site are looking for reliable information, period. Their major concern is whether the articles they read have been corrupted. Anyone who desires to go beyond that to the nuts-and-bolts of wiki editing can do so, so this is win-win. Not perfect, perhaps, but far better than what we have. Let's go for it. Durova Charge! 04:58, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I support implementing these policies as soon as possible. Kaldari 22:23, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
I support this in theory, but viewing a non-current page by default goes against the whole spirit of a wiki. A huge number of good contributions come from non-logged in users, and while this proposal will not prevent them from contributing, it seems inevitable that it will confuse. This in particular: "users who are not logged in may not see the most recent version of a page by default, but will always edit the most recent version." That’s just asking for trouble. Perhaps there should be a reverse of this idea, so that all users see the current version, but there is an option to view a reviewed history version. Think outside the box 13:00, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
(outdent) I see the legitimate side of this objection and I think it can be addressed through communication and outreach. Durova Charge! 06:33, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
It would probably be a fairly minor change to the software so that once a reader has made an edit they are sent to the most recent (non-stable) version of the page for the rest of their browsing session. This would substantially reduce the 'wtf my edit is gone' factor. -- Gmaxwell 18:35, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
We need a better term than "Sighted". The implication is that blind users are excluded. Further, there is no explanation of what the term derives from or means exactly and I am at a loss to imagine how or why it was chosen. Why not call it "Presentable" or "Reviewed" or "Inspected" or "Examined" or "Scrutinized"? Of these, the first, "Presentable" is the lowest level and probably the most appropriate term because it connotes the least amount (none) of fact-checking.
As an aside, I would suggest at least two editors and possibly three to inspect an article before it gains this status, otherwise it becomes another way for a single editor with an agenda to have an oversized impact on Wikipedia. Collusion is not likely to be a problem for more than a couple of articles because it becomes possible to compare edits and see patterns if collusion exists. Hu 20:57, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I do get the core reason why we are doing this. We're trying to combat vandalism and other thing. Heck, I've got a proposal of my own to combat vandalism. I have heard about this idea (patrolled edits) before, and I think it was tested on the de.wp before (?). But I think more than any other proposal I've seen, this is in great contradiction to the spirit of Wikipedia. WP is an ever moving and changing encyclopedia. When you edit something it goes live the second after you press save. There are a couple reason I don't like this proposal:
People may not like it, but those are my reasons. But then again, what do I know? I'm just a reader, editor, administrator. - Royalguard11( T· R!) 02:11, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
In light of my recent comments I feel I should state my ideas on how this proposal should work. I feel that the featured articles process could be improved. The featured and good article processes are a way to assure the reader that the article they are reading is of the highest quality. I believe there should be two processes, to simply give them names I will call them: Highest Quality and High Quality. High Quality articles will be subject to the FA criteria, excluding criterion 1a. I believe that engaging prose is not what most readers are looking for in a quality article. An article can have an average level of prose and still be high quality. People nitpick about prose at FAC, but rarely help fix it. Highest Quality articles will be subject to all of the FA criteria and the article must be examined by a subject expert. The definition of subject expert will require much debate, I am certain. I believe that High Quality articles should have a silver star at the top of the article, giving a short explanation of the High Quality process. Highest Quality articles would have a golden star, and one or more green checkmarks. The checkmarks would say when you hover over them: This article has been as being factually correct and comprehensive by [subject expert's name]. The link would go to a page that tells about the subject expert and their examination of the article.
How does this fit into the proposal? Well, I completely disagree with the sighted version proposal. I've stated my disagreements with it elsewhere. High and Highest Quality articles will be granted the quality status by administrators and bureaucrats after they have passed the processes. When a user has the quality version open, and they click edit, a message will explain that they may be editing a different revision of the page than the quality one. It will also say the changes they make will only show on the "current revision" page. Every month a process would determine whether the current revision is an improvement of the article. Some changes to the current revision may need to be made for it to pass. Any editor can request that the current revision be compared to the quality revision, up to once a week for Highest Quality articles and up to once every three days for High Quality articles.
These are my ideas. Since this proposal is likely going to go through one way or another let's focus on assuring quality. Psych less 03:58, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Looking forward to implementation. This will fix ALOT of problems, but it needs to be done right. The controls on who gets to mark revisions approved are absolutely crucial. -- CBD 13:26, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Thought of several more things;
-- CBD 22:23, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
CBD makes some great points -- as we go further down the list I agree with more and more of them. The possibility that a puppet master would give the right to a ton of sockpuppets is rather disturbing, even though in general I like the version where surveyors can give the sighting permission to other surveyors. We may need a tool to identify and fix this problem--will there be a way for editors (or at least admins) to see to whom an editor has given this privilege? Tieing the ability to edit semi-protected pages, create new articles, etc., to surveyors seems reasonable since as CBD points out it requires the same general understanding of WP and Mediawiki as we'd expect from surveyors. Point #2 is also important to reduce confusion.
BTW -- it sounds like we've definitely committed to a two-stage rollout with the anti-vandal stage (sighting) being the major point under discussion now and Reviewing/Quality being placed on the back burner? I think the project page should be updated to reflect that. Best, -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 18:06, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Hello,
I'm the point of contact from the WMF Board on flagged revisions for the time being. I will discuss our deployment strategy next week with Sue Gardner, who is currently heading WMF operations. To clarify, nothing is set into stone yet, and we want the community to be part of the process every step of the way.
It is likely that the next thing that will happen is a very public beta test of the extension on a dedicated test wiki, with a call to developers to systematically improve the usability and scalability of the extension. After that, my recommendation will be that each wiki community is given the choice to deploy this extension or not, with a clearly defined process for making a decision to do so.
Regarding the deployment parameters, my personal opinion is that it would be foolish to immediately set the extension to always show the last "sighted" revision to unregistered users. When we do not yet know whether the sighting of revisions will scale, immediately changing the default of all pages could massively impact usability of day-to-day users and new contributors. I also suspect that there are significant usability problems with showing different revisions to registered and unregistered users.
Unfortunately, the extension does not support setting the default view on a per-page level yet. With that functionality, it would be possible to organically expand the number of pages whose default view is the last "sighted" revision. Without that functionality in place, I would be reluctant to change the default view at all.
But this is just my recommendation, and if the en.wp community feels that we should roll out the extension with the default view changed for all users, this is what will happen. It may make sense to have a poll on various aspects of the configuration at the end of the public beta.-- Eloquence * 19:17, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
If this system is to be adopted, considerable thought needs to be given to making sure that good-faith contributors who haven't registered or are newbies don't feel that their contributions are disappearing into a black hole. The problem of recruitment & retention of knowledgeable editors is, I believe, as acute as that of controlling vandalism, and the proposed change would seem to run the risk of controlling one at the cost of severely exacerbating the other.
This would probably need to include an explicit message on saving that the edits have been accepted but won't be publicly visible until they've been sighted by an experienced editor, efforts on the part of all the WikiProjects &c to sight revisions to the articles under their umbrella extremely rapidly -- preferably within hours, and a noticeboard for non-sight-privileged editors to bring edits that have languished for more than, say, 48 hours. Espresso Addict 23:26, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
The way that I read this proposal, edits made to an article would not appear to most users until they have been Sighted. Is that correct? If so, it seems to be me that we don't have the manpower to constantly be sighting revisions, and the backlog of unsighted revisions would make it so that the newest version of many articles would be unviewable for a fairly long amount of time. I would be more inclined to support this proposal if revisions appeared immediately without being sighted, at which time the default version shown to unregistered users would be the most current version. Then, a user could sight a revision, and that would become the new default.-- Danaman5 16:39, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Jitse, your argument about good articles becoming degraded over time applies well to the "quality versions" section of this proposal. It is indeed tough when someone improves an article to good or featured status and then sees it degraded. That's why I support the quality versions portion of the plan. However, I believe that the sighted versions portion goes too far, in that it makes every edit a hassle. If we want to retain experts, we have to find a middle ground, where they know that their valuable contributions will not be degraded, but also that they can build the article up from a stub without too much trouble.-- Danaman5 04:33, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
Many, perhaps most, valid edits are minor things - grammar, formatting, categorisation, simple factual updates etc - and all of those edits would be more hassle if this was implemented. Therefore I believe that is would hamstring the whole project by reducing the amount of such good edits. There is an underlying false assumption that articles reach a point where they don't need much more editing - many of the most trafficked articles cover rapidly changing subjects that need to be updated a great deal. Baridiah 22:05, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
Could someone who knows about how Mediawiki merges stuff comment on this. I have this vague recollection that I once edited a section of a page and someone inserted very rude vandalism by editing a different section. This went unnoticed for quite some time, I assume because other people thought I had checked the previous edit.
Is this possible that he inserted this at the same time as I was editing the page and then the software merged our edits? In any case, this vandalism went unnoticed for a very long time, and when I noticed it, I was searching the edit history to find the idiot who had let such blatant vandalism into the article. I was quite embarrassed when I saw that I had edited immediately after the vandal.... I like to think that this was merged, but perhaps I was just sloppy.
In any case, I'm a bit afraid of the auto-sighting idea, and so I made some bold edits to the proposal. I hope other people will be equally bold in fixing this stuff, if my fears are not well founded.
Cheers, Merzul 12:08, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
See my proposal on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). It was a proposal similar to this, but it also proposed that links be available on official policy pages to the revisions that became policy, so that if the content of the policy is changed without consent or universal knowledge, this can be discovered and not mistaken to be the originally agreed-upon policy.-- 64.149.189.119 19:05, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
Please say whether you support or oppose this proposal. Eyu100( t| fr| Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 15:50, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
"Yes" to a review process and stable versions, but "no" to the suggested implementation here, a "Reviewer" (or "Surveyor") user class with special power over content.
Heres my two cents worth. When my 5 year old jumps on and simply deletes things on wikipedia, creating work for others to revert, I think just by placing this simple criteria saves a lot of inadvertent mistakes, time, and introduces some form of accountability and traceability. all the best. -- T3Smile 17:23, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
There should never be a system where one particular version is "the right version" (i.e. a "quality" version.) We need to acknowledge that consensus can -- and will -- change, and sometimes, it will change drastically. The idea of having a "stable version" to work off of shifts the preference toward past consensus instead of future consensus. Not only is this just a bad idea because of the inevitably contentious nature of the system, it will also go against the Wikipedia philosophy. .V. Talk| Email 17:35, 23 August 2007 (UTC)