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This entire moves seems like a total PR-push, and will have very little effect on vandalism. All it will do is
Just my two cents. -- Jayron32| talk| contribs 17:37, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
The public already believes we support any article we put up as true. -- AnonEMouse (squeak) 19:12, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I feel that this concept and more so its method of implementation fundamentally violates what wikipedia is.
Sighted revisions effectly deny the community the ability to edit an article when they see an error. If we hide errors/vandalism from viewers fewer will make changes to the wiki. But this is our main line of recruitment. Few of us came to be editors because we woke up one morning and thought "I know, i'll write an article for wikipedia today"... most of us saw mistakes and then changed them on the spot, this aroused our curiosity and before we knew it we'd been here over a year and had thousands of edits :) by disrupting this system we are isolating our current editors. This upsets me as I honestly think its one of the worst things we could do.
My second major gripe is with the 'surveyor', who seems to basically be a new class of editor, who has the power to decide what is and isn't right. But there are two problems with this:
I'll explain the first because it may not be obvious, but not being wrong (i.e. the facts in teh article are correct) isn't all that make an article. Many of our FAs are good, but not perfect. A recent one talked at length about a russian princess, but for example didn't explain how she died (she was murdered). So although i'm sure all the facts were correct, they omitted a major part of that article. To endorse the article with what is effectively a mark of quality though seems counter productive as it discourages editors from making positive changes especially if they are quite sure, but not 100% sure if they are right.
In conclusion this is a nice idea, and well done for spending the time to come up with a serious and theoretically implementable proposal... but fundamentally this violates what a wiki is all about, its long term effects could be very bad and at the end of the day I can't see it achieving any of the goals set out. We will forever be under threat from libel, we will always be accused of inaccuracy by the Britianic/Encarta etc. old guard and media. It doesnt even really tell a user how good the article they are seeing is, its very qualitative. And there are so many articles, I cannot bear to think how long it will take to survey them, especially if we consider there are only 1300 admins and it sounds like this surveyor class needs to authorised by an admin. Who is going to do that work? admins are already stretched thin! If I have misunderstood any aspects of this please feel free to correct me, but I can say right now that fundamentally I cannot agree with this, it just violates what wikipedia is about. WikipedianProlific (Talk) 17:52, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
With regards to the number of surveyors, there shouldn't be a problem there. Because becoming a surveyor would require a certain level of experience, surveyors would be very unlikely to decide to vandalize. Anyway, if they did abuse the sighting revisions power, an admin could remove their surveyor flag. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 18:50, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Okay I'm not quite sure if I understand everything, so I'll give a try at summarizing this...
If this was to be accepted, we would basically be reviewing a version of an article. If the article is "presentable" under the different criteria stated in the page, it will gain the status of "sighted revision", so we can see when it was last seen without vandalism, etc.. Same thing for "quality version", except the criteria are for FA and frequently visited articles.
I'm not sure if I understand this fully, can someone please tell me (in a quick and simple way) what I didn't get right, and what I didn't understand at all?
Thanks in advance!
Zouavman Le Zouave 17:53, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm a little confused by what is meant by "sighted". Is this simply a misspelling of "cited", or is there some other meaning? If "cited" is the word that was meant, I'm still a little unclear on how it's being used here.
Personally, I rarely read Wikipedia articles top-to-bottom, except perhaps when under some kind of review (e.g. FA; GA). Obviously, when a revision is marked as "sighted," there's some level of trust that we're going to have to put in one another that we really can trust the cited version. So If I see an article history that goes something like:
etc, it would seem perfectly logical to compare the diff of 12:05 to the diff of 12:06, see the user fixed a spelling mistake, and mark the new version as cited. What I worry about is that there's going to be very few people who will want to read an entire article, including external links, every time they want to make a revision. This means that the first person to mark a revision as "sighted" is going to be very important, because most likely, most subsequent "sighted" tags are going to be applied mainly by checking diffs. "No problem," you say, "we'll just organize patrols of all sighted revisions. Yeah right. There are 6,839,050 articles on the English Wikipedia! It will be completely unfeasible to read through bajillions of kilobytes of text on any reliable basis. The sheer manpower this would require may not be insurmountable, but it would detract enormously from all other areas of improvement. "That's not much different from the present system" you say. But the key is that under this new system, there's going to be an illusion of increased accuracy, and will bring with it an obligation on our editors to stand up for that accuracy, but doing so will mean sacrificing any growth in our encyclopedia. -- Ybbor Talk 18:17, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have a couple of FA's that I've been the majority editor on...so I have some knowledge of what this means.
I like the 'sighted' proposal and would certainly support it.
The 'quality' proposal is much more difficult. It assumes that a 'featured' article is 100% finished. But what happens if the world changes? If I have an article about (say) a kind of car - today, it's 100% finished so I push it (at enormous effort - trust me on this!) to FA status and it's flagged as 'quality' and now appears by default when someone seeks information about that car. What happens if a new model of that car comes out? I add half a dozen paragraphs and a new photo - but those will always be hidden by the 'quality' version. In order to get a simple addition to this article (and an addition that a lot of people will be coming here to read about) - I now have to get the article re-stamped through the FA process? Geez - that's an awful lot of work for everyone. The number of re-FAC's from articles that just need a tiny change will be significant. Will we have to go through all of the bloody annoying nit-picking all over again? You just know that things that passed the first time are going to get complained about the second (third, fourth) time...it's in the nature of the process.
Lots of times, changes in an FA are not even due to the world changing. Frequently people add new translations of the article into new languages (this happens a lot over the months immediately after passing FAC because non-English authors like to translate FA's into their native languages because it's more productive to translate a great article than a mediocre one). What happens when the Category system changes (eg My Mini article went from being an 'English automobile' to being a 'British automobile' then to being a 'Defunct British automobile'). Suppose a template or an image or a linked article is renamed? Even FA's with absolutely perfect, up to date content get updated quite frequently because of events that are out of their control. We can't have them gradually rotting because the infrastructure around them is changing - and we can't have editors having to go back to the Reviewer team for every stupid little cat: change.
And meanwhile - for however long this process could take - the article may well be flat out WRONG as far as casual readers are concerned! We'd be in a situation where these 'quality' articles are in much worse shape than typical un-flagged articles - and the much better version can't ever be easily improved!
I believe that if this process is going to work, we should nominate one or two keepers for each 'quality' article. Keepers being (perhaps) the people who nominated the article and pushed it through FAC in the first place - who would have the same rights as Reviewers - but only for those specific articles that they "keep". This would allow (in practice) the original majority author of a truly great article to have the authority to re-stamp it as 'quality' with whatever changes are needed without a great deal of red tape and associated delay. The assignment of 'keeper' status would be done by the FAC process - so as a part of FAC acceptance, they would look at the edit history and pick one or two people who could clearly be trusted to 'keep' the article maintained.
If the 'keepers' proposal is not possible - then we would need a DRAMATICALLY slimmed down re-FAC/re-quality-flagging process - something that could be repeated (if necessarily) as often as once a week for a month or more - and which would under no circumstance take more than 24 hours to approve the new version of the article. The sheer administrative overhead of this seems horrible to me...but it's better than nothing.
Failing that - I strongly oppose the idea of the 'quality' version of the article being the one casual visitors see when they come to Wikipedia. At most, I'd agree with having a button somewhere on FA's banner that says something like "Click here to see a quality reviewed version of this article - which may be a little out of date" ...or something like that. It would be a waste of time because nobody would click on it - but what the heck - it's better than the crappy old, outdated, redlink/missing-image-ridden 'quality' version showing up all the time.
SteveBaker 18:19, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
In order to prevent vandalism, it would be enough to flag just articles which are prone to be vandalised. (For example, I only work on mathematics articles, which are hardly every vandalised. Such a flagging procedure appears rather hindering than helping in such cases). Somewhere it was mentioned that 6% of the edits are vandalism. How many pages are vandalised on a regular basis?
Another suggestion: vandalism can be handled better if enough people watch the articles. Is it possible to display something like: This page is currently watched by 493 users, vandalism will be in approx. 31 hours (or 5 minutes or whatever, depending on the page). If there are too little people watching a certain page, a request could be generated to editors who are belonging to an appropriate Wikiproject.
Jakob.scholbach 18:20, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Is it known how many constructive edits are made by editors which are not logged in? I guess we will lose these ones to a large extent. Jakob.scholbach 21:58, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Another question to Pyrospirit: how does the sighted flag improve new articles (at the page of the proposal, no positive effect except linked to vandals and "the public perception of WP" is mentioned)? I can only see the following disadvantage: anonymous editors will be pushed back from editing because they don't see the most current version where an error etc. might already have been fixed. This may decrease their voluntary help. Jakob.scholbach 22:05, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This talk page is getting rather crowded and long; anyone think we should divide it into 2 parts? One for discussion of the surveyor position and sighted flag, and the other for the reviewer position and quality flag. This might make the whole discussion a little easier to sort through. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 18:26, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Flagging good versions is not the correct path. Flagging the bad versions is the correct choice. Just like how black-listing email spammers is much less effective than white-listing people you trust.
How?
Every user starts out on the grey-list and every edit has to be vetted by someone on the white-list. As a user attains accepted edits then they are white-listed. If a user vandalizes then they are penalized severely and put on the grey-list and then eventually on the black-list. So, instead of assuming a user is a good user you assume what is most natural: "unsure" == grey-listed. It's heavily based in merit. You must earn "respect" as an editor and you lose it when you abuse it.
A point system would be easy. (Exact point values are semi-arbitrarily chosen to demonstrate my point.) Start at zero. If an edit is vetted then you get a point. If you get marked as vandalism then you get penalized 5 points. Hit 500 points and you are white-listed and can now vet others' edits. Hit -50 points and you're black-listed. An admin can immediately black list you (aka block) if necessary per normal procedures. If you are found to have vetted a vandalistic edit then you are immediately grey-listed as your assessment is questioned. A white-listed user abusing this latter point (say, for tactical reasons in an argument) is punished much more severly.
This puts responsibility on the vetter and the vetted with checks and balances on both. No group can beat the system because you are penalized for participating negatively. My main problem with the proposed version flagging system is that it groups vandals and non-vandals together into "unsighted versions". As a surveyor, you have to "sight" every non-sighted version which means you are flagging good edits, not the bad ones.
For a similar concept, see the karma system for slashdot.
Ultimately, I think there is too high volume of edits to effectively, and explicitly, flag good versions as proposed. A more automated way (i.e., points), IMO, will be the only effective way to keep the volume manageable now and in the future as volume continues to increase. Cburnett 19:08, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
If I understand correctly, this flagged revision system will mean that if I edit a page, that edit will not be immediately shown to all users who visit (unless I am blessed with some kind of special status from an admin?) This, to me, breaks wikipedia. I understand the desire to fight vandalism, improve Wikipedia's image, etc., but this is the wrong solution. Anything that does not allow "edit this page" to function as expected must be avoided. Sdedeo ( tips) 19:12, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I am not interested in applying for special status from an admin, and I think I'm in good company. At best -- if the status is granted automatically by the software as in semi-protection -- it would amount to semi-protecting the entire wiki. Sdedeo ( tips) 20:26, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This is a much needed feature. Protection hinders development of the article and does not guarantee a stable and reliable material. In cases of content disputes it is really helpful to have an outsider come and read the article before the material becomes available.-- Alexia Death the Grey 19:14, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I agree with WikipedianProlific on this one. This seems like an unnecessarily bureaucratic addition that would create a new special class of editor. This is in direct opposition to efforts at preventing hierarchies. What absolutely essential need for this is there? It seems just like a cool new toy that we don't direly require to continue to function and improve. Complete protection is not used that commonly or for so long as to create a large problem. There are very good reasons for halting all edits to an article, and a loophole to this seems improper. VanTucky (talk) 19:14, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Oppose is my vote for now. I am amazed at the depth of the Requirements for Sighted pages on the proposal page. Here, I would like to make a point-by-point criticism of those requirements. They are roughly arranged in order from best to worst.
Fine. But I'd rather see this done with bots, for backlog reasons stated by many. When an anonymous user posts, the post gets flagged for bot review. The user sees his post, but with a warning at the top that it has been flagged and isn't yet visible to all users.
If the bot finds something odd, *then* the post is flagged for human review. "odd" is to be defined (and should be standardized), but is more lax than normal anti-vandal bot rules: more things should be flagged, and a few valid edits being flagged isn't a problem. For instance, external links to any source not "approved" could be flagged. However, blocks like *.gov and *.mil should be "approved".
Anonymous users viewing the page should see a tab labeled "flagged versions" or something, where they can see their contributions.
I don't like this. "Wiki-wiki" means quick. This is not quick at all. The bot review process shouldn't take more than an hour or two IMHO.
I would rather present questionable spelling instances, in the new edit *only*, to the user originally submitting the edit, rather than waiting for a reviewer. I wouldn't even mind having Wikipedia show them one at a time, via Javascript or something:
"not cluttered-up pages with no wikilinks" is good. I wonder if a bot could be made to auto-wikilink such things? But it seems to me that the user's contributions should be accepted, and the bot's tagged for human review.
"not tagged for cleanup" is a mess. Do you realize how many pages are already tagged for cleanup, and not being cleaned up? There is no way you'll get enough editors to fix up everything that need "cleanup".
I'm not sure I like this. If I'm curious about something, I'd rather see that Wikipedia at least knows about it. And, of course, articles converted to one-line stubs would be reverted by an anti-vandal bot.
This is really hard. If I insert "ex-" in front of "wife" in an article, and the reviewer knows nothing about that person, how is the reviewer to check whether or not that person got divorced? But conversely, if that person did get divorced, and "ex-" wasn't added, that might be just as bad!
Similar deal. Basically, it seems to me that to do this with any efficiency, we would need another encyclopedia to check the encyclopedia!
This is even harder. I have a hard time even understanding what "unencyclopaedic" means.
All in all, I do not support the proposal as currently stated. I would not support it unless the work for reviewers were much reduced.
-- Ken g6 19:20, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
And the spell check reminds me: this is a formula for Anglo-American disputes, and the unhelpful form of nationalism which insists that WP must use the local spelling, no matter how rare or incomprehensible in English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:09, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I think the biggest problem I have with this proposal is the fact that articles (given the over 1.9m) could get stuck in some limbo of not getting frequent enough sights. However I also like the idea that a previous FA/GA version of an article might be available for easy perusal. Is there a way to simply add an option at the top of pages that indicates something to the effect of "_(#)_ version(s) of this page have been designated as Feature Articles in terms of quality (etc)... To see that (those) versions of the article, click here." We could integrate parts of this current proposal to allow experiences/designated users to update those constant FA/GA links to include useful edits (including small sp/grammar/etc edits). It just seems like it would allow the best versions to remain on the public face (which is what this proposal is all about) while also inviting users new and old to participate in the current version as it evolves (which I think is being neglected in the current proposal). -- Bobak 19:23, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Maybe I've read a lot of the opposition wrong, and the general idea wrong, but it seems a lot of people aren't reading what would happen correctly. Let's see if I got this right:
Am I missing something? In my mind, this is a very VERY good idea on a way to reduce vandalism and, as mentioned elsewhere, keep quality articles up to quality. I've seen some pages that just keep going in CIRCLES. I can easily see this helping the circle turn into an upward line. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ 19:45, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Could someone explain what this debate is about to me in simple terms? Smartyshoe 19:52, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
There is a big difference between spotting vandalism and checking the facts of an article. "Sighted" should just mean "clear of obvious vandalism". There can be another flag "fact checked" if people want to be able to mark articles as fact checked. Even if sources are cited, actually getting hold of that source and checking it can be a lot of work. It's worth doing that work before featuring an article, but having to do it before every edit is visible to non-logged in users would slow the system down too much. -- Tango 19:56, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Many discussants opposing this proposal assume that having sighted versions that appear by default to anonymous readers and editors will turn off new editrs, since their edits will not appear immediately. There will no doubt be some new editors who feel this way, but there are also many would-be editors who don't edit because the next person's edits automatically overwrite theirs, without any sort of intermediate determination of who was adding valuable material and who was adding nonsense. The affirmation of having one's (anonymous of new-user) edits validated by another editor is also a powerful psychological motivation to continue contributing; as it is, many new users go for a long time without even knowing whether anyone has seen their contributions.
Because only article with at least one sighted version will be affected by this and un-developed and under-developed articles will be the most likely to lack sighted versions, most situations where substantial worthwhile content is added by new anonymous users will be unaffected. Their edits will still show up, because there is no sighted version of what they are editing. In developed articles, the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower, and new users should appreciate Wikipedia's editing processes more if they see that some sort of vetting goes on with changes to major articles.
It's hard to measure the potential editors who don't participate because of the lack of something like this, but I strongly suspect that they are more numerous (and more capable) than those who would only edit without such measures in place.-- ragesoss 20:02, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have one minor suggestion, primarily to reduce sight-warring: once a Surveyor "unsights" a revision, that revision should be permanently unsighted. If Surveyors are to be trusted (and this whole process depends on it) that means there is some valid concern to the revision when a Surveyor unsights it. Thus, any sight-war is restricted either to (1) edit-warring between Surveyors as new revisions are created, and Wikipedia already has measures to discourage that; or (2) moving the sightable revision farther back in history -- which I believe is a positive solution, as Surveyors may come to an agreement in temporarily presenting an older, smaller, and less controversial version of an article. As a side note, I am not taking a position as to whether Admins would be able to reverse an unsight. Jpers36 20:31, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Having only discovered this discussion today (thanks to the topnote on my watchlist) I will keep my comments short. I really like the sighted idea. I watch labour related articles, and would be very interested in being able to work through them to set a sighted status. I would see this as a baseline effort which could then be maintained though an ongoing process. I would additionally be interested in being able to maintain a list (presumably at the WP:UNION page) of labour related articles and their sightedness… something like the assessment system, with varying levels of decay. i.e.
or some such criteria. I think this would help distribute the workload, even for articles that are not watched by everyone interested at the particular project.
As for the editing/version/change is bad/elitism/other difficulties - I'll leave that argument to others, but the idea seems worth using, and would undoubtedly get polished along the way.-- Bookandcoffee 20:35, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I think that this is a good idea as long as: 1) Surveyor rights are given away very liberally to registered users. 2) Reviewer rights are given away somewhat liberally to registered users in a process similar to RfA. Actually, I think that Reviewer rights should possibly be simply another one of the tools granted to administrators. That way, users who become admins through the RfA process will also be able to mark an article as quality. -- דניאל - Danielr ocks123 20:47, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
But there are only 1300 admins at the moment, and we've already identified that in order to be able to class an article as quality reviewed, the reviwer will (for practical and technical reasons) probably need to be either already an admin or of a reasonable admin like ability. So if there are only 1300 admins right now, how many reviewers are we actually going to have? I expect maybe 25 to begin with, raising to 50-100 maybe in due course. So out of the nearly 2 million articles, we're talking about less than several hundred reviewers, and every article needs to be read. Its just not practical at all. It creates so much new work that it will slow other admin heavy tasks like AfD, IfD and so forth. And this isn't even touching on the issue of how can an expert in automobiles possibly comment on the quality of a medicine or biochemistry article? Then we have to consider the slippery slope of asking people about their qualifications, bam zip before you know it, its citizendium. WikipedianProlific (Talk) 21:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
In a perfect world, the Wikipedia servers would look into a crystal ball and somehow magically know whether each person accessing Wikipedia was a frequent editor and which are strictly viewers-only. In that perfect world, strict readers would always see Sighted versions, and editors would always see Most Recent versions. If that perfect world existed, I would advocate rolling out flagged revisions to all pages, not just some quality articles and as an alternative to semi-protection.
Lacking a crystal ball, this proposal aims to use IP vs. registered status as an indicator... and I just don't buy it. Although, granted, I am assuming this based only on gut feeling. It would be interesting if there were a way to measure over a given time period how many IP addresses were view-only (no edits), and how likely a registered user was to make an edit in a given day. Maybe the correlation is stronger than I think.
In any case, even without this "crystal ball" to determine editor vs. reader, this at a minimum seems like a good alternative to semi-protection. But I don't see it being generally useful beyond that. -- Jaysweet 20:48, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Broadly support in principle, amazed that we haven't attempted this before. There's been several comments on BBC radio programmes about the ability to screw up articles, so we need to smarten up before we become discredited. It's parallel, in software terms, to development and release versions. Comments
Folks at 137 21:03, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
What would be the general edit count/time of serve to get this? It should be automatically given fairly early. It should be given early enough that the user probably would not know that they have this ability right after it is given because they would still be too new like me and the move ability. Zginder 21:05, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I tried editing the section titled "A few points" and when I hit the edit button the entire text does not show up. It stops at a comment that says: "Hmmm..." by VoiceofAll. What is this? Brusegadi 21:40, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
The good thing is that this will discourage the easy to spot vandalism. Yet, what if vandalizing becomes hard enough that people really try. Non-factual edits that are hard to spot can become the next big thing for the lonely highschool boys all over the world. So all those guys that write things like "WHOAAAAAA!!!!!" will become more sophisticated and begin to change the birthdays of not well known characters, geographic locations of cities, etc... They would not even need the power to 'approve' this edits. I can imagine well intentioned "approvers" being convinced by the arguments provided by the IPs... What I am trying to say is that; are we trading one evil for a worst one? Brusegadi 21:49, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Edit summary for this removal: "*sigh* ... we went through this debate months ago. We do not need to advertise this to everyone -- at present time it's about solidifying a proposal rather than bringing in the useless banter with ads" Badagnani 01:42, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Dear Melodia Chaconne (that's a very nice username!): you can see the removal of the notice here; there was no discussion, as before. Badagnani 02:54, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
New edit summary from same user: "Archiving lots of stuff including the asanine straw poll .. the last thing we want now is to turn this into a bloodbath of voting by people who don't even understand the concept)". Badagnani 02:52, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
It was "archived" here. Badagnani 03:56, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Oh, good lord. The watchlist notice was removed for exactly this reason -- such a public advertisement brings nothing but hot-heads and nonsensical straw polls to the discussion. At present time we're simply trying to formulate a decent proposal; once said proposal is formulated, then it will be brought to a "vote". On the same train of thought, that straw poll gives people the illusion that we're voting on the exact text of this proposal and discourages rationale discussion about its faults. I do find it quite strange that you should refrain from chastising someone for making such blatant changes to the interface without discussing (especially in a case known to be contentious), but rather should chastise someone who returns to it its initial state. In any case, if some active discussion was archived, please do restore what is needed -- I thought it was quite clear however that this straw poll was doing nothing but leading to more confusion, and indeed the talk page was quite ridiculously long (if I might add, filled with the nonsensical redundant jabber that a watchlist message such as this brings). AmiDaniel ( talk) 04:16, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
That's so funny that the editor who makes rash edits, removing crucial text from this discussion page, summarily deletes notices of this discussion for the wider WP community s/he seems to distrust, leaves consistently rude (and poorly spelled) edit summaries, insults other editors by implying that any editor who disagrees with this proposal is a "hothead," etc. is the one calling other editors "hotheads." It's the very definition of "irony." Badagnani 04:36, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Some good/changes have come out of the discussion influx, so I certainly welcome it. I'd add the notice back myself, but I'm afraid someone would add a "straw poll" section again. Voice-of-All 12:38, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
This proposal is certainly not ready to be put to a straw poll. There are still major changes being made. Some kind of democratic final decision will probably be required for something this big (there is no way we'll ever achieve a consensus), but we're not there yet. A watchlist notice should only be put up once we're ready for a poll. People interested in working out the details of the proposal can find their way here by other means (village pump, etc). -- Tango 15:27, 24 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 |
This entire moves seems like a total PR-push, and will have very little effect on vandalism. All it will do is
Just my two cents. -- Jayron32| talk| contribs 17:37, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
The public already believes we support any article we put up as true. -- AnonEMouse (squeak) 19:12, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I feel that this concept and more so its method of implementation fundamentally violates what wikipedia is.
Sighted revisions effectly deny the community the ability to edit an article when they see an error. If we hide errors/vandalism from viewers fewer will make changes to the wiki. But this is our main line of recruitment. Few of us came to be editors because we woke up one morning and thought "I know, i'll write an article for wikipedia today"... most of us saw mistakes and then changed them on the spot, this aroused our curiosity and before we knew it we'd been here over a year and had thousands of edits :) by disrupting this system we are isolating our current editors. This upsets me as I honestly think its one of the worst things we could do.
My second major gripe is with the 'surveyor', who seems to basically be a new class of editor, who has the power to decide what is and isn't right. But there are two problems with this:
I'll explain the first because it may not be obvious, but not being wrong (i.e. the facts in teh article are correct) isn't all that make an article. Many of our FAs are good, but not perfect. A recent one talked at length about a russian princess, but for example didn't explain how she died (she was murdered). So although i'm sure all the facts were correct, they omitted a major part of that article. To endorse the article with what is effectively a mark of quality though seems counter productive as it discourages editors from making positive changes especially if they are quite sure, but not 100% sure if they are right.
In conclusion this is a nice idea, and well done for spending the time to come up with a serious and theoretically implementable proposal... but fundamentally this violates what a wiki is all about, its long term effects could be very bad and at the end of the day I can't see it achieving any of the goals set out. We will forever be under threat from libel, we will always be accused of inaccuracy by the Britianic/Encarta etc. old guard and media. It doesnt even really tell a user how good the article they are seeing is, its very qualitative. And there are so many articles, I cannot bear to think how long it will take to survey them, especially if we consider there are only 1300 admins and it sounds like this surveyor class needs to authorised by an admin. Who is going to do that work? admins are already stretched thin! If I have misunderstood any aspects of this please feel free to correct me, but I can say right now that fundamentally I cannot agree with this, it just violates what wikipedia is about. WikipedianProlific (Talk) 17:52, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
With regards to the number of surveyors, there shouldn't be a problem there. Because becoming a surveyor would require a certain level of experience, surveyors would be very unlikely to decide to vandalize. Anyway, if they did abuse the sighting revisions power, an admin could remove their surveyor flag. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 18:50, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Okay I'm not quite sure if I understand everything, so I'll give a try at summarizing this...
If this was to be accepted, we would basically be reviewing a version of an article. If the article is "presentable" under the different criteria stated in the page, it will gain the status of "sighted revision", so we can see when it was last seen without vandalism, etc.. Same thing for "quality version", except the criteria are for FA and frequently visited articles.
I'm not sure if I understand this fully, can someone please tell me (in a quick and simple way) what I didn't get right, and what I didn't understand at all?
Thanks in advance!
Zouavman Le Zouave 17:53, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm a little confused by what is meant by "sighted". Is this simply a misspelling of "cited", or is there some other meaning? If "cited" is the word that was meant, I'm still a little unclear on how it's being used here.
Personally, I rarely read Wikipedia articles top-to-bottom, except perhaps when under some kind of review (e.g. FA; GA). Obviously, when a revision is marked as "sighted," there's some level of trust that we're going to have to put in one another that we really can trust the cited version. So If I see an article history that goes something like:
etc, it would seem perfectly logical to compare the diff of 12:05 to the diff of 12:06, see the user fixed a spelling mistake, and mark the new version as cited. What I worry about is that there's going to be very few people who will want to read an entire article, including external links, every time they want to make a revision. This means that the first person to mark a revision as "sighted" is going to be very important, because most likely, most subsequent "sighted" tags are going to be applied mainly by checking diffs. "No problem," you say, "we'll just organize patrols of all sighted revisions. Yeah right. There are 6,839,050 articles on the English Wikipedia! It will be completely unfeasible to read through bajillions of kilobytes of text on any reliable basis. The sheer manpower this would require may not be insurmountable, but it would detract enormously from all other areas of improvement. "That's not much different from the present system" you say. But the key is that under this new system, there's going to be an illusion of increased accuracy, and will bring with it an obligation on our editors to stand up for that accuracy, but doing so will mean sacrificing any growth in our encyclopedia. -- Ybbor Talk 18:17, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have a couple of FA's that I've been the majority editor on...so I have some knowledge of what this means.
I like the 'sighted' proposal and would certainly support it.
The 'quality' proposal is much more difficult. It assumes that a 'featured' article is 100% finished. But what happens if the world changes? If I have an article about (say) a kind of car - today, it's 100% finished so I push it (at enormous effort - trust me on this!) to FA status and it's flagged as 'quality' and now appears by default when someone seeks information about that car. What happens if a new model of that car comes out? I add half a dozen paragraphs and a new photo - but those will always be hidden by the 'quality' version. In order to get a simple addition to this article (and an addition that a lot of people will be coming here to read about) - I now have to get the article re-stamped through the FA process? Geez - that's an awful lot of work for everyone. The number of re-FAC's from articles that just need a tiny change will be significant. Will we have to go through all of the bloody annoying nit-picking all over again? You just know that things that passed the first time are going to get complained about the second (third, fourth) time...it's in the nature of the process.
Lots of times, changes in an FA are not even due to the world changing. Frequently people add new translations of the article into new languages (this happens a lot over the months immediately after passing FAC because non-English authors like to translate FA's into their native languages because it's more productive to translate a great article than a mediocre one). What happens when the Category system changes (eg My Mini article went from being an 'English automobile' to being a 'British automobile' then to being a 'Defunct British automobile'). Suppose a template or an image or a linked article is renamed? Even FA's with absolutely perfect, up to date content get updated quite frequently because of events that are out of their control. We can't have them gradually rotting because the infrastructure around them is changing - and we can't have editors having to go back to the Reviewer team for every stupid little cat: change.
And meanwhile - for however long this process could take - the article may well be flat out WRONG as far as casual readers are concerned! We'd be in a situation where these 'quality' articles are in much worse shape than typical un-flagged articles - and the much better version can't ever be easily improved!
I believe that if this process is going to work, we should nominate one or two keepers for each 'quality' article. Keepers being (perhaps) the people who nominated the article and pushed it through FAC in the first place - who would have the same rights as Reviewers - but only for those specific articles that they "keep". This would allow (in practice) the original majority author of a truly great article to have the authority to re-stamp it as 'quality' with whatever changes are needed without a great deal of red tape and associated delay. The assignment of 'keeper' status would be done by the FAC process - so as a part of FAC acceptance, they would look at the edit history and pick one or two people who could clearly be trusted to 'keep' the article maintained.
If the 'keepers' proposal is not possible - then we would need a DRAMATICALLY slimmed down re-FAC/re-quality-flagging process - something that could be repeated (if necessarily) as often as once a week for a month or more - and which would under no circumstance take more than 24 hours to approve the new version of the article. The sheer administrative overhead of this seems horrible to me...but it's better than nothing.
Failing that - I strongly oppose the idea of the 'quality' version of the article being the one casual visitors see when they come to Wikipedia. At most, I'd agree with having a button somewhere on FA's banner that says something like "Click here to see a quality reviewed version of this article - which may be a little out of date" ...or something like that. It would be a waste of time because nobody would click on it - but what the heck - it's better than the crappy old, outdated, redlink/missing-image-ridden 'quality' version showing up all the time.
SteveBaker 18:19, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
In order to prevent vandalism, it would be enough to flag just articles which are prone to be vandalised. (For example, I only work on mathematics articles, which are hardly every vandalised. Such a flagging procedure appears rather hindering than helping in such cases). Somewhere it was mentioned that 6% of the edits are vandalism. How many pages are vandalised on a regular basis?
Another suggestion: vandalism can be handled better if enough people watch the articles. Is it possible to display something like: This page is currently watched by 493 users, vandalism will be in approx. 31 hours (or 5 minutes or whatever, depending on the page). If there are too little people watching a certain page, a request could be generated to editors who are belonging to an appropriate Wikiproject.
Jakob.scholbach 18:20, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Is it known how many constructive edits are made by editors which are not logged in? I guess we will lose these ones to a large extent. Jakob.scholbach 21:58, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Another question to Pyrospirit: how does the sighted flag improve new articles (at the page of the proposal, no positive effect except linked to vandals and "the public perception of WP" is mentioned)? I can only see the following disadvantage: anonymous editors will be pushed back from editing because they don't see the most current version where an error etc. might already have been fixed. This may decrease their voluntary help. Jakob.scholbach 22:05, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This talk page is getting rather crowded and long; anyone think we should divide it into 2 parts? One for discussion of the surveyor position and sighted flag, and the other for the reviewer position and quality flag. This might make the whole discussion a little easier to sort through. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 18:26, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Flagging good versions is not the correct path. Flagging the bad versions is the correct choice. Just like how black-listing email spammers is much less effective than white-listing people you trust.
How?
Every user starts out on the grey-list and every edit has to be vetted by someone on the white-list. As a user attains accepted edits then they are white-listed. If a user vandalizes then they are penalized severely and put on the grey-list and then eventually on the black-list. So, instead of assuming a user is a good user you assume what is most natural: "unsure" == grey-listed. It's heavily based in merit. You must earn "respect" as an editor and you lose it when you abuse it.
A point system would be easy. (Exact point values are semi-arbitrarily chosen to demonstrate my point.) Start at zero. If an edit is vetted then you get a point. If you get marked as vandalism then you get penalized 5 points. Hit 500 points and you are white-listed and can now vet others' edits. Hit -50 points and you're black-listed. An admin can immediately black list you (aka block) if necessary per normal procedures. If you are found to have vetted a vandalistic edit then you are immediately grey-listed as your assessment is questioned. A white-listed user abusing this latter point (say, for tactical reasons in an argument) is punished much more severly.
This puts responsibility on the vetter and the vetted with checks and balances on both. No group can beat the system because you are penalized for participating negatively. My main problem with the proposed version flagging system is that it groups vandals and non-vandals together into "unsighted versions". As a surveyor, you have to "sight" every non-sighted version which means you are flagging good edits, not the bad ones.
For a similar concept, see the karma system for slashdot.
Ultimately, I think there is too high volume of edits to effectively, and explicitly, flag good versions as proposed. A more automated way (i.e., points), IMO, will be the only effective way to keep the volume manageable now and in the future as volume continues to increase. Cburnett 19:08, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
If I understand correctly, this flagged revision system will mean that if I edit a page, that edit will not be immediately shown to all users who visit (unless I am blessed with some kind of special status from an admin?) This, to me, breaks wikipedia. I understand the desire to fight vandalism, improve Wikipedia's image, etc., but this is the wrong solution. Anything that does not allow "edit this page" to function as expected must be avoided. Sdedeo ( tips) 19:12, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I am not interested in applying for special status from an admin, and I think I'm in good company. At best -- if the status is granted automatically by the software as in semi-protection -- it would amount to semi-protecting the entire wiki. Sdedeo ( tips) 20:26, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This is a much needed feature. Protection hinders development of the article and does not guarantee a stable and reliable material. In cases of content disputes it is really helpful to have an outsider come and read the article before the material becomes available.-- Alexia Death the Grey 19:14, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I agree with WikipedianProlific on this one. This seems like an unnecessarily bureaucratic addition that would create a new special class of editor. This is in direct opposition to efforts at preventing hierarchies. What absolutely essential need for this is there? It seems just like a cool new toy that we don't direly require to continue to function and improve. Complete protection is not used that commonly or for so long as to create a large problem. There are very good reasons for halting all edits to an article, and a loophole to this seems improper. VanTucky (talk) 19:14, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Oppose is my vote for now. I am amazed at the depth of the Requirements for Sighted pages on the proposal page. Here, I would like to make a point-by-point criticism of those requirements. They are roughly arranged in order from best to worst.
Fine. But I'd rather see this done with bots, for backlog reasons stated by many. When an anonymous user posts, the post gets flagged for bot review. The user sees his post, but with a warning at the top that it has been flagged and isn't yet visible to all users.
If the bot finds something odd, *then* the post is flagged for human review. "odd" is to be defined (and should be standardized), but is more lax than normal anti-vandal bot rules: more things should be flagged, and a few valid edits being flagged isn't a problem. For instance, external links to any source not "approved" could be flagged. However, blocks like *.gov and *.mil should be "approved".
Anonymous users viewing the page should see a tab labeled "flagged versions" or something, where they can see their contributions.
I don't like this. "Wiki-wiki" means quick. This is not quick at all. The bot review process shouldn't take more than an hour or two IMHO.
I would rather present questionable spelling instances, in the new edit *only*, to the user originally submitting the edit, rather than waiting for a reviewer. I wouldn't even mind having Wikipedia show them one at a time, via Javascript or something:
"not cluttered-up pages with no wikilinks" is good. I wonder if a bot could be made to auto-wikilink such things? But it seems to me that the user's contributions should be accepted, and the bot's tagged for human review.
"not tagged for cleanup" is a mess. Do you realize how many pages are already tagged for cleanup, and not being cleaned up? There is no way you'll get enough editors to fix up everything that need "cleanup".
I'm not sure I like this. If I'm curious about something, I'd rather see that Wikipedia at least knows about it. And, of course, articles converted to one-line stubs would be reverted by an anti-vandal bot.
This is really hard. If I insert "ex-" in front of "wife" in an article, and the reviewer knows nothing about that person, how is the reviewer to check whether or not that person got divorced? But conversely, if that person did get divorced, and "ex-" wasn't added, that might be just as bad!
Similar deal. Basically, it seems to me that to do this with any efficiency, we would need another encyclopedia to check the encyclopedia!
This is even harder. I have a hard time even understanding what "unencyclopaedic" means.
All in all, I do not support the proposal as currently stated. I would not support it unless the work for reviewers were much reduced.
-- Ken g6 19:20, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
And the spell check reminds me: this is a formula for Anglo-American disputes, and the unhelpful form of nationalism which insists that WP must use the local spelling, no matter how rare or incomprehensible in English. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:09, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I think the biggest problem I have with this proposal is the fact that articles (given the over 1.9m) could get stuck in some limbo of not getting frequent enough sights. However I also like the idea that a previous FA/GA version of an article might be available for easy perusal. Is there a way to simply add an option at the top of pages that indicates something to the effect of "_(#)_ version(s) of this page have been designated as Feature Articles in terms of quality (etc)... To see that (those) versions of the article, click here." We could integrate parts of this current proposal to allow experiences/designated users to update those constant FA/GA links to include useful edits (including small sp/grammar/etc edits). It just seems like it would allow the best versions to remain on the public face (which is what this proposal is all about) while also inviting users new and old to participate in the current version as it evolves (which I think is being neglected in the current proposal). -- Bobak 19:23, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Maybe I've read a lot of the opposition wrong, and the general idea wrong, but it seems a lot of people aren't reading what would happen correctly. Let's see if I got this right:
Am I missing something? In my mind, this is a very VERY good idea on a way to reduce vandalism and, as mentioned elsewhere, keep quality articles up to quality. I've seen some pages that just keep going in CIRCLES. I can easily see this helping the circle turn into an upward line. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ 19:45, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Could someone explain what this debate is about to me in simple terms? Smartyshoe 19:52, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
There is a big difference between spotting vandalism and checking the facts of an article. "Sighted" should just mean "clear of obvious vandalism". There can be another flag "fact checked" if people want to be able to mark articles as fact checked. Even if sources are cited, actually getting hold of that source and checking it can be a lot of work. It's worth doing that work before featuring an article, but having to do it before every edit is visible to non-logged in users would slow the system down too much. -- Tango 19:56, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Many discussants opposing this proposal assume that having sighted versions that appear by default to anonymous readers and editors will turn off new editrs, since their edits will not appear immediately. There will no doubt be some new editors who feel this way, but there are also many would-be editors who don't edit because the next person's edits automatically overwrite theirs, without any sort of intermediate determination of who was adding valuable material and who was adding nonsense. The affirmation of having one's (anonymous of new-user) edits validated by another editor is also a powerful psychological motivation to continue contributing; as it is, many new users go for a long time without even knowing whether anyone has seen their contributions.
Because only article with at least one sighted version will be affected by this and un-developed and under-developed articles will be the most likely to lack sighted versions, most situations where substantial worthwhile content is added by new anonymous users will be unaffected. Their edits will still show up, because there is no sighted version of what they are editing. In developed articles, the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower, and new users should appreciate Wikipedia's editing processes more if they see that some sort of vetting goes on with changes to major articles.
It's hard to measure the potential editors who don't participate because of the lack of something like this, but I strongly suspect that they are more numerous (and more capable) than those who would only edit without such measures in place.-- ragesoss 20:02, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have one minor suggestion, primarily to reduce sight-warring: once a Surveyor "unsights" a revision, that revision should be permanently unsighted. If Surveyors are to be trusted (and this whole process depends on it) that means there is some valid concern to the revision when a Surveyor unsights it. Thus, any sight-war is restricted either to (1) edit-warring between Surveyors as new revisions are created, and Wikipedia already has measures to discourage that; or (2) moving the sightable revision farther back in history -- which I believe is a positive solution, as Surveyors may come to an agreement in temporarily presenting an older, smaller, and less controversial version of an article. As a side note, I am not taking a position as to whether Admins would be able to reverse an unsight. Jpers36 20:31, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Having only discovered this discussion today (thanks to the topnote on my watchlist) I will keep my comments short. I really like the sighted idea. I watch labour related articles, and would be very interested in being able to work through them to set a sighted status. I would see this as a baseline effort which could then be maintained though an ongoing process. I would additionally be interested in being able to maintain a list (presumably at the WP:UNION page) of labour related articles and their sightedness… something like the assessment system, with varying levels of decay. i.e.
or some such criteria. I think this would help distribute the workload, even for articles that are not watched by everyone interested at the particular project.
As for the editing/version/change is bad/elitism/other difficulties - I'll leave that argument to others, but the idea seems worth using, and would undoubtedly get polished along the way.-- Bookandcoffee 20:35, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I think that this is a good idea as long as: 1) Surveyor rights are given away very liberally to registered users. 2) Reviewer rights are given away somewhat liberally to registered users in a process similar to RfA. Actually, I think that Reviewer rights should possibly be simply another one of the tools granted to administrators. That way, users who become admins through the RfA process will also be able to mark an article as quality. -- דניאל - Danielr ocks123 20:47, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
But there are only 1300 admins at the moment, and we've already identified that in order to be able to class an article as quality reviewed, the reviwer will (for practical and technical reasons) probably need to be either already an admin or of a reasonable admin like ability. So if there are only 1300 admins right now, how many reviewers are we actually going to have? I expect maybe 25 to begin with, raising to 50-100 maybe in due course. So out of the nearly 2 million articles, we're talking about less than several hundred reviewers, and every article needs to be read. Its just not practical at all. It creates so much new work that it will slow other admin heavy tasks like AfD, IfD and so forth. And this isn't even touching on the issue of how can an expert in automobiles possibly comment on the quality of a medicine or biochemistry article? Then we have to consider the slippery slope of asking people about their qualifications, bam zip before you know it, its citizendium. WikipedianProlific (Talk) 21:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
In a perfect world, the Wikipedia servers would look into a crystal ball and somehow magically know whether each person accessing Wikipedia was a frequent editor and which are strictly viewers-only. In that perfect world, strict readers would always see Sighted versions, and editors would always see Most Recent versions. If that perfect world existed, I would advocate rolling out flagged revisions to all pages, not just some quality articles and as an alternative to semi-protection.
Lacking a crystal ball, this proposal aims to use IP vs. registered status as an indicator... and I just don't buy it. Although, granted, I am assuming this based only on gut feeling. It would be interesting if there were a way to measure over a given time period how many IP addresses were view-only (no edits), and how likely a registered user was to make an edit in a given day. Maybe the correlation is stronger than I think.
In any case, even without this "crystal ball" to determine editor vs. reader, this at a minimum seems like a good alternative to semi-protection. But I don't see it being generally useful beyond that. -- Jaysweet 20:48, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Broadly support in principle, amazed that we haven't attempted this before. There's been several comments on BBC radio programmes about the ability to screw up articles, so we need to smarten up before we become discredited. It's parallel, in software terms, to development and release versions. Comments
Folks at 137 21:03, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
What would be the general edit count/time of serve to get this? It should be automatically given fairly early. It should be given early enough that the user probably would not know that they have this ability right after it is given because they would still be too new like me and the move ability. Zginder 21:05, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I tried editing the section titled "A few points" and when I hit the edit button the entire text does not show up. It stops at a comment that says: "Hmmm..." by VoiceofAll. What is this? Brusegadi 21:40, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
The good thing is that this will discourage the easy to spot vandalism. Yet, what if vandalizing becomes hard enough that people really try. Non-factual edits that are hard to spot can become the next big thing for the lonely highschool boys all over the world. So all those guys that write things like "WHOAAAAAA!!!!!" will become more sophisticated and begin to change the birthdays of not well known characters, geographic locations of cities, etc... They would not even need the power to 'approve' this edits. I can imagine well intentioned "approvers" being convinced by the arguments provided by the IPs... What I am trying to say is that; are we trading one evil for a worst one? Brusegadi 21:49, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Edit summary for this removal: "*sigh* ... we went through this debate months ago. We do not need to advertise this to everyone -- at present time it's about solidifying a proposal rather than bringing in the useless banter with ads" Badagnani 01:42, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Dear Melodia Chaconne (that's a very nice username!): you can see the removal of the notice here; there was no discussion, as before. Badagnani 02:54, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
New edit summary from same user: "Archiving lots of stuff including the asanine straw poll .. the last thing we want now is to turn this into a bloodbath of voting by people who don't even understand the concept)". Badagnani 02:52, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
It was "archived" here. Badagnani 03:56, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Oh, good lord. The watchlist notice was removed for exactly this reason -- such a public advertisement brings nothing but hot-heads and nonsensical straw polls to the discussion. At present time we're simply trying to formulate a decent proposal; once said proposal is formulated, then it will be brought to a "vote". On the same train of thought, that straw poll gives people the illusion that we're voting on the exact text of this proposal and discourages rationale discussion about its faults. I do find it quite strange that you should refrain from chastising someone for making such blatant changes to the interface without discussing (especially in a case known to be contentious), but rather should chastise someone who returns to it its initial state. In any case, if some active discussion was archived, please do restore what is needed -- I thought it was quite clear however that this straw poll was doing nothing but leading to more confusion, and indeed the talk page was quite ridiculously long (if I might add, filled with the nonsensical redundant jabber that a watchlist message such as this brings). AmiDaniel ( talk) 04:16, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
That's so funny that the editor who makes rash edits, removing crucial text from this discussion page, summarily deletes notices of this discussion for the wider WP community s/he seems to distrust, leaves consistently rude (and poorly spelled) edit summaries, insults other editors by implying that any editor who disagrees with this proposal is a "hothead," etc. is the one calling other editors "hotheads." It's the very definition of "irony." Badagnani 04:36, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Some good/changes have come out of the discussion influx, so I certainly welcome it. I'd add the notice back myself, but I'm afraid someone would add a "straw poll" section again. Voice-of-All 12:38, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
This proposal is certainly not ready to be put to a straw poll. There are still major changes being made. Some kind of democratic final decision will probably be required for something this big (there is no way we'll ever achieve a consensus), but we're not there yet. A watchlist notice should only be put up once we're ready for a poll. People interested in working out the details of the proposal can find their way here by other means (village pump, etc). -- Tango 15:27, 24 August 2007 (UTC)