Wikipedia talk:Flagged revisions/Trial/Votes

This is a vote page for a straw poll on a proposed flag revisions trial.

We have now had plenty of time to discuss and refine this proposal to the point where the majority of its bugs have been ironed out. It is now time, I believe, to proceed to demonstrate a consensus for or against its implementation by means of a straw poll. The question to be considered is effectively:

“ Should the proposed configuration of FlaggedRevisions be enabled on the English Wikipedia? ”

Support

Supports 1–100

1. Support — Sure, let's see what happens. No harm in a trial. ► RATEL ◄ 21:07, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

That's extremely naive. No "trial" change like this to the project has ever actually ended; see WP:CREEP. -- Kendrick7^talk 17:19, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

1. Per all my various posts and throughts on the Wikipedia:Protecting BLP articles feeler survey that I began. rootology (C)(T) 17:48, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
2. I participated in creation of this trial proposal. So I support. Ruslik (talk) 17:57, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
3. Something that's been long overdue, although I think that the surveyor function should be bundled with the admin tools. bibliomaniac15 18:08, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
4. Support this seems a reasonable configuration (probably agreeing with Bibliomaniac above however), however I would much prefer that the first proposed trial be a small random selection of BLPs (all beginning with Q or Z for instance) firstly because I think (ref. Wikipedia:Protecting BLP articles feeler survey) BLPs is where the strongest support for flagged revisions can be found, and secondly because they will be a fair sample of wikipedia's articles (small, long, little edited, widely edited, etc.) rather than the existing two proposed samples which would not be representative of wikipedia's wider articles. Davewild (talk) 18:16, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   That definitely sounds like a good possible trial. Why don't you write that up on the /Proposed trials page? Happy‑melon 18:19, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   I have added it to the proposed trial page. We can change the letter as needed if people think it should be larger or smaller group. Davewild (talk) 22:54, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

5. Support. --Barberio (talk) 18:17, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
6. Support Xclamation point 18:19, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
7. Support. This has been a long time coming, and will add a little bit of professionalism to articles. Ec5618 13:18, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
8. Support --Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:29, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
9. Avruch ^T 18:30, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
10. I believe flagged revisions are potentially a great improvement but there are unknowns like whether or not a substantial backlog will develop. So we need a trial. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 18:34, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
11. Support - This is worth trying. I think it will be helpful in dealing with problems on BLP articles. Also would support a trial for featured articles. --Aude (talk) 18:35, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
12. I think this feature is needed to improve the reliability of Wikipedia articles. A trial would be a good way of demonstrating its effectiveness. Wronkiew (talk) 18:35, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
13. Support A trial will give us some hard evidence as to how the system works, and will allow us to make a better judgment as to whether to implement it across more articles. --Falcorian ^(talk) 18:38, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
14. Support a trial, certainly. Martin 18:40, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
15. I'm all for experimenting with new ideas, let's see how it works out. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 18:44, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
16. support --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 18:46, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
17. Support, we've discussed this to death. Let's get some experience with it.-gadfium 18:49, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
18. Support Flagged revisions would be a great improvement. JoJan (talk) 19:03, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
19. Support. Absolutely - nothing to lose, everything to gain, especially regarding BLPs. Black Kite 19:19, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
20. Support. Extremely strong support in fact. It's definitely worth a trial, and there's a lot of support at the BLP feeler survey. - Taxman ^Talk 19:23, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
21. Strong support: The only reason people ever criticise us is that we're not reliable - the sooner we implement FlaggedRevs, the sooner we remove any criticism of Wikipedia. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 19:26, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

    Flagging should make us less reliable, and makes us more like Citizendium. Both are bad. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:36, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

    How would it make us less reliable? Things have to be checked before going live, meaning factual inaccuracies don't make it into articles. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 00:50, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Because flagged articles will tend to lose fixes offered by people without sighting privileges, and therefore accumulate crud which the flaggers have missed. Most of our substance, after all, derives from anon edits. The idea that flaggers will actively check the accuracy of edits is a fantasy; the advocates of this test repudiate it here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:58, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    It's better than semiprotection. This will only be selective, and should provide a happy compromise between 'anyone can edit' and semi protection - thereby allowing some people to edit articles they could not previously edit. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 19:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

22. shoy (reactions) 19:35, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
23. Support Give it a try. It's better to evaluate in practice rather than keep discussing in theory. MrMurph101 (talk) 19:49, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
24. Support -- Ed (Edgar181) 19:56, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
25. Support. This has been long discussed and a successful experiment will be invaluable, no matter what the conclusion is. Dcoetzee 19:59, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
26. Reluctant Support - I oppose Flagged Revisions in principle with all the force I can muster, but I suppose that there is no practical way to make a reasoned decision than to see them in action. J.delanoy^gabs_adds 20:06, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

    Support. Opposing something based on guesses about the results, especially guesses that contradict what information we do have, is not helpful. Mr.Z-man 20:08, 2 January 2009 (UTC) - Changed to oppose. Mr.Z-man 03:27, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

27. Support - Something needs to be done to repair Wikipedia's reputation. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 20:13, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
28. Support implementing this at small scales and going from there seems the best way to catch any tech or philosophical problems that could arise from it. --MASEM
29. Support - No way a trial about this can be bad. I've been following this for over a year now and have seen all the pros and cons put forward multiple times. All said and done, I cannot see any harm in a test run and hope this finally goes forward rather than the circles it's been in for ages. Almost all issues with this are already issues in the first place as the way things stand now, so it can only really help, not hurt. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 20:21, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
30. Support - how can I, as a scientist, judge something without an empirical test? The data of others is fine, but I'll always understand my own data better ... WilyD 20:21, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
31. Support with Reservations, born of both my apprehensions over how such a program would actually interact with everything from the various sub-cultures on a day-to-day basis to the greater architecture of the system over time (and my own opinions and proposals), and my conviction that evidence is better than the absence of evidence. Ngorongoro (talk) 20:52, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
32. Support It's certainly worth experimenting with. There is no harm in a trial, and benefits to be gained either way. --.:Alex:. 20:58, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

    Support - Something needs to be done to repair Wikipedia's reputation. - 20:12, 2 January 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.83.204.61 (talk)

33. Support: There are a couple of pages on my watchlist that could really benefit from this. --Carnildo (talk) 21:15, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
34. Support. Seems like a well-designed framework for testing out FlaggedRevs.--ragesoss (talk) 21:36, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
35. Support - Fritzpoll (talk) 21:40, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
36. Support There's not going to be anything negative from trying. Stop being picky eaters and eat the damn vegetables! §hep • ¡Talk to me! 22:01, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
37. Support, this is a very sensible first step. We can change who are reviewers, and other configuration items, after we have made the first step. Some are worried there is a scaling problem: I seriously doubt that the community as a whole will be overwhelmed, as implementing this will mean that some tasks no longer need to be done with as much urgency (e.g. reverting vandals; NPP). My opinion is that this extension will be a net time saver, but of course the first few weeks are going to be extra busy as we learn the subtleties of the feature, and the addon tools like Twinkle may take a few weeks to be ready to help us process this queue quickly. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 22:22, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
38. Tactical Strong Support, because I think this is the stupidest idea I have ever heard of, and I would like to see it fail as soon as possible so we can archive it as a really bad idea, and be done with it forever. Jerry delusional ¤ kangaroo 22:57, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

    I agree. Why not demonstrate what a ridiculous idea this is, so we can avoid it actually happen. Jonathan321 (talk) 04:33, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

39. Worth a try If it goes down in flames at least we'll know to look for other options. Dance With The Devil (talk) 23:42, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
40. Support I think I explained my reasoning before, so I don't repeat here. -- Taku (talk) 00:30, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
41. Qualified Support As scalability is a major issue, I would prefer a full real test on a defined subset of vwey actively edited articles rather that the proposed trial which might not reach levels where real results will be seen. Data from a potentially very limited test might not be valid if the use of flagging were extended to large numbers of articles. The earlier real data is gathered, the better. I also have some concernes with "reviewers" as a new level of authority rather than extending sighting to all editors with sufficient experience (who, presumably, are quite unlikely to be the vandals we seek to prevent). Collect (talk) 00:56, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
42. Support - All previous efforts on controlling vandalism and unwanted edits have been frustrating to participate in, when so many people look through the same revision again and again, without any control on what's already been done. A patrolling system without visual indicators to raise the attention and interest of editors can't get sufficient participation either, when there is no cue and no visible effect. Flagged revisions has all of this, and I believe enough users will participate when it's available, like they have with Wikipedia generally. --Para (talk) 01:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
43. Support --Jake Wartenberg^Talk 01:28, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
44. Strong support, for a number of reasons.
    • Firstly, I'd like to point out the necessity of a trial—so much of the English Wikipedia community's understanding of this feature has been shaped either by rumour, gut feeling, or opinion, not by hard, proven facts. A trial—multiple trials, even—is necessary if we are ever to reach the point where we can all engage in an intellectual, reasoned debate over the flagged revisions extension.
    • Secondly, reliability is paramount to an encyclopedia project—whether or not said encyclopedia is produced via strong collaboration. Reliability gives knowledge value, not openness. This feature actually does not harm openness itself, it merely gives experienced users an opportunity to engage in constructive checking and review of edits made by others. This two-person approach is important from both a practical and a scholarly approach.
    • Thirdly, Wikipedia currently suffers seriously from malicious edits that can seriously damage the lives and reputations of real people—most notably, libellous alterations. We have a moral duty to our readers, and to the subjects of our articles on biographies of living persons, to ensure that libel and other forms of disasteful, horrible material do not appear publicly.

    Please support this feature! – Thomas H. Larsen 03:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

45. Strong Support. I've been here for four years and never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever did I think this day might actually come. RyanGerbil10(Four more years!) 04:54, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
46. Support Esp for BLP. --mav (talk) 06:00, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
47. Strong Support - way overdue. Let's just do this please - even in a limited way, but let's get started. Note that this is a trial and not some sort of permanent implementation. Let's see what the trial results in, and re-evaluate. To the opposers - supporting this is not the end, it's just a step along the path, so let's just use it to obtain real data here - Alison ^❤ 06:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
48. Support - should have been done in 2007. I've had some wild and wrongful things written about me on Wikipedia. It will be helpful to see exactly which characters flag through the libelous garbage. Which will hopefully beget a sense of responsibility, and thus less garbage. -- He called me with jack high (talk) 06:49, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Is the expectation here that reviewers will have some form of legal experience? Would you take action against a reviewer if under the Flagged Revision system he/she becomes somehow particularly 'responsible' for the passing of material you deem "libelous garbage" but they mistakenly or willingly don't see it the same way. MickMacNee (talk) 07:28, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

49. Broadly Support, although I'd like to see the permissions handed out a bit more liberally. As many people say, the trick is to get something up and running, and then we can look at how it's performing, and what changes we might like to make. I support flagged revisions in general, and I therefore support getting anything sensible and small-scale up and running, lest we remain stuck in a permanent quagmire of deciding what colour we would like our wheels to be. — Werdna • talk 07:01, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
50. Support the proposed setup. I generally support FlaggedRevs, but still have questions about the feasibility of the backlog and other problems. This setup will allow us to explore these issues instead of standing still as we have been doing for too long.--Danaman5 (talk) 08:33, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
51. Qualified Support; the proposed trial on letter-limited BLP articles seems very clever. The qualification is that there be a strong presumption that after the trial FR not be implemented, unless the trial is a superbe success ~ a success agreed to by a super-majority of users. Probably this is what sdsds meant by Sunset Provisions below. Cheers, Lindsay^Hi 08:48, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
52. Support I believe that this can only be an improvement, but we absolutely need a trial to confirm whether that's true or not. Bring it on!Anaxial (talk) 09:28, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
53. Support We won't know if this is good or bad if we don't try. I'm rather optimistic that a trial doesn't spell total doom either way. – sgeureka ^t•c 11:34, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
54. Support - good configuration for small-scale trials. --B. Wolterding (talk) 12:36, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
55. Support, let's try it for a set amount of time, it will allow us to judge if it is ready for prime time. --Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 13:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
56. Support; article protection, particularly semi-protection, is woefully overused. Anything at all to take the edge off of that is a welcome change. I'll take a little delayed gratification rather than not being able to edit an article at all any day. HiDrNick! 13:17, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
57. Dubious support, I'm not personally convinced that flagged revisions is a great idea, but I'm open to it being tested - and BLPs seems a good place to do so. My largest concern is that, after a brief period of novelty value, a huge backlog of revisions to be sighted will develop; so if any kind of long-term backlog develops during a smaller-scale test I'd encourage people to consider how badly a site-wide implementation is going to go. ~ mazca ^t|c 13:18, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
58. Support, but only on a very small subset by now (maybe on what is currently known as "semi-protected articles"). I tried the demo and am happy with it, I just have a problem with the comment field of the sighting dialog: Am I required to write a comment just to say "I have read this article and found no blatant nonsense in it" ? Nicolas1981 (talk) 13:20, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Sighting is equivalent of stating that there is no vandalism in the article. Comments are optional. Ruslik (talk) 13:24, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

59. Replacing semi-protection with flagging seems like an obvious improvement. Including BLPs seems reasonable too. But why guess? Needs to be tested, sooner the better. Angus McLellan (Talk) 13:50, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
60. Support trial. I have strong reservations about this idea, but let's see how it works in practice. There should be a wide selection of articles inlcuded in this trial, otherwise the results won't be meaningful. The trial should include at least two of the following: FA article, BLP article, science article, controversial politics article. In each category there should be one high traffic and one low traffic article (traffic with respect to edits/day, not views). Xasodfuih (talk) 13:53, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
61. Support per my comments on the BLP feeler survey. ~~ [ジャム]^[t - c] 14:03, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
62. Support trial, because it should be abundantly clear that this issue isn't going to disppear without a trial, and because we had a 2 to 1 margin in favor during the last poll on implementing for BLPs (Wikipedia:Protecting BLP articles feeler survey) ... but only for BLPs. There's more to say, but I'll wait til we have some trial data to discuss. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:07, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
63. Support Makes watchlisting easier. — Edokter • Talk • 14:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
64. Support: worth a trial, then we can decide whether to implement it or not. bahamut0013^words_deeds 14:24, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
65. Yes do it If it doesn't work turn it off. Spartaz ^Humbug! 14:26, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
66. Strong support. If it doesn't work, we can turn it off. Massive benefits if it works, no long-term drawbacks if it does not. Ironholds (talk) 14:35, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
67. Strong Support -- It is an excellent limited trial. This protracted pro and con debate about flagged revisions could continue ad infinitum, but is yet only based on theory. A real world test will finally provide some concrete evidence to decide on the practicality of flagged revisions for the English Wikipedia. It is time to move forward and get some answers. — CactusWriter | ^needles 14:40, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
68. Support Ealdgyth - Talk 14:46, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
69. As soon as possible, especially on BLPs. -- Jeandré, 2009-01-03t14:50z
70. Strong support: It's about time! - BillCJ (talk) 14:59, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
71. Support - it's a good idea, which has been in use over at de:wikipedia for a while now. A trial run should expose some of the issues and benefits of such a system. – Toon^(talk) 15:05, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
72. Timid support - this is trial basis only, and appears to have potential. I'm quite worried however that it will greatly confuse many editors (especially new ones - "where's my edit?"), and the advancement of pages will slow down considerably. At very least, we should and must place a note on top of the edit page, if not the regular page itself. Magog the Ogre (talk) 15:20, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
73. Support I haven't had the time to check through the tiny minutiae, but the limited proposal seems sound, and is a way for our quality to increase without locking out anonymous edits entirely. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^(talk) 15:22, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
74. Support Given that so much of my watchlist is filled with random vandalistic edits and/or reversions, I look forward to seeing if flagged revisions can help. --moof (talk) 15:25, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
75. Support Good experiences in de-WP. --Leyo 15:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
76. Support with skepticism – There are potential problems with a full-scale implementation that a small-scale test will not make apparent. The test must include high and low traffic pages. The test should include some newly created pages. I am concerned with the effect on little-watched pages where reliable editors make quality changes, and are then unable to make those changes appear to the public. Any wide implementation should include a usergroup whose edits are trusted and auto-sighted - to not have that would mean pointless extra work sighting the edits of trustworthy editors. Of course, un-trusted editors means known vandals and newbies, and we don't want to discourage newbies by making their edits not show up. Vandalism is a drawback to the nature of a wiki; this proposal addresses that by taking some of the positive wiki nature out of the wiki. — Swpb^{τ • c} 15:43, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
77. Support, Tom Harrison ^Talk 15:56, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
78. Support trial - It goes slightly against Wikipedia's slogan -"anyone can edit" as only 'reviewers' will be able to change the content displayed on the page instantly, but still worth a try. I think 'reviewer' flag should be given to all autoconfirmed users. --Unpopular Opinion (talk) 15:59, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
79. Support — Past due, really. This is great. Cheers, Jack Merridew 16:03, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
80. Support. The time has come to make a proper usable trustworthy encyclopedia available to the user. The only way to do this now is to present guaranteed reviewed content to them. I might propose to limit it to FAs and possibly GAs though - that is, stuff where the main content has consensus and been worked over a lot. Articles in development (i.e., everything else) may benefit less. Unusual? Quite ^TalkQu 16:28, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
81. Support. I like the idea, as i think it would really help the stability aspect. --♬♩ Hurricanehink (talk) 16:33, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
82. Very Strong Support per Unpopular Opinion. Willking1979 (talk) 16:35, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
83. Support – Potentially a very useful enhancement to the wiki, merits a full trial. Rjwilmsi 16:42, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
84. Support per my comment further down the page. Just make sure the specifics of implementation are reasonable. Estemi (talk) 16:51, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    By "reasonable", I mean that only well-developed articles (eg B quality or higher) should have flagged revisions and "stable" pages. Obviously, requiring gainsaying/approval for ALL changes on Wikipedia would be a huge mistake and cripple the growth of early-stage articles. Flagged revisions should be in place on high-traffic pages. Estemi (talk) 17:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

85. Support for reasons already stated by many others above me. CIreland (talk) 17:07, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
86. Strong, happy, enthusiastic support. It's a test, not an implementation, and empirical testing is the way to find out whether it is good or bad, whether the fears of the opponents will prove true or not. No rational person should fear finding out the truth. I'd gladly support a test of SP too. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:20, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
87. Support - for the reliability of WP. --Harald Khan Ճ 17:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
88. Support - let's see if it works. Tim Vickers (talk) 18:01, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
89. Support. I would need to see this in action in order to form any opinion about it. dissolve^talk 18:03, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
90. Support - nothing to lose, everything to gain. See if it works. Ale_Jrb^talk 18:21, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
91. Support SU Linguist (talk) 18:41, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
92. Support Not perfect, but a move in the right direction. faithless (^speak) 18:41, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
93. Support - full protection is harmful. If there are enough reviewers to not let a backlog form, I'd happily trade the immediacy of edits becoming live (not much more than ego-boosting anyway) for the ability to really have every page editable by anyone. --Waldir ^talk 19:21, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
94. Conditional support Soon as someone writes a Huggle-like recent edits patrol program. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 19:30, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
95. Support -- Commdor {Talk} 19:50, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
96. Strong support per all above. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Quantumobserver (talk • contribs) 20:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
97. Support - As others have said: this is a test. Regardless of whether you oppose or support it, let's find out if it works. Burnedthru 20:06, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
98. Support To be blunt - screw wiki-philosophy - I want some damn data. Lets go get some results on FlaggedRevs and then have our ridiculous arguments afterwards.--Tznkai (talk)
    • This proposal lacks the conditions - specifically the control group - that would get us data. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
    • I can't agree, Sept. The data would not be as controlled as one might wish, but it will still give us information.sinneed (talk) 20:57, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Supports 101–200

101. Support Brad 20:22, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
102. Strong support - While I am unsure that this model is workable, I am confident we will learn important lessons that cannot be learned through discussion only.
     :On reviewing comments within the test and playing with this version a bit more...I am more confident that the test is good, and I think we will miss a great opportunity if we don't try this in the real world. It seems to me to be a great way to reduce admin workload and general frustration when an article is under attack by vandals or the subject of an edit war: a way to let people continue to edit, perhaps even sort out their squabble without the rest of the world being subjected to their behaviour. Much less disruptive than page protection. (signed... very belatedly. oops. sinneed (talk) 03:39, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
103. Support --McSly (talk) 20:31, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
104. Support trial. I am skeptical about flagged revisions. In particular, if introduced, I think they should essentially only be used to deal with vandalism, on a simple sighted/unsighted basis, with no further elaboration, and that sighting should (if technically possible) expire after a short time period. However, the only way to see whether concerns are genuine obstructions or not is to try the thing out. Geometry guy 21:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
105. Support - I think it is worth a small scale test at the very least, usually not everything is comes out as expected with discussion, and a trial is not going to destroy Wikipedia. I am not too concerned with the specificness of the proposal, if the trial results are skewed I am sure there will be plenty of people around to point it out and discredit it. Camaron | Chris (talk) 21:18, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
106. Support - it's worth a go, to see whether it works or not for us. Mike Peel (talk)
107. Support - Xxanthippe (talk) 21:56, 3 January 2009 (UTC).
108. Support No harm in seeing what happens. If it turns out to be terrible, it can always be deactivated. -ruby.red.roses 22:33, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
109. Support. Suggest striking all votes (on either side) by people who obviously don't understand what flagged revisions actually are. Phil Sandifer (talk) 22:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

     Determining who has an obvious misunderstanding requires some judgment. It's better to talk and explain the situation to them—hopefully it will lead them to a more informed opinion. Ozob (talk) 23:50, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

110. Strong Support a trial is the best way to see if the claims (by both sides of the debate) have merit and get an idea if the benefits outweigh the costs or vice versa. Eluchil404 (talk) 22:42, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
111. Support. Let's give it a try and not dismiss it out of hand. – ukexpat (talk) 22:50, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
112. Reluctant support. Let's see how it works. What worked for Wikipedia until now may not necessarily be the best thing in the future. On the other hand, flagged revisions may prevent us from implenting something even better. GregorB (talk) 23:18, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
113. Guarded support. I see others here, who, like myself, are not certain about the wisdom of out-and-out adopting flagged revisions for BLPs, much less as a whole. But since in the discussions above I have indicated my support for the idea of applying them to BLPs until they reach a certain length or quality level as a way of reducing the potential liability risk from an overlooked BLP turned into a platform for a defamatory attack, I would support a trial run that would probably make up a lot of minds (However, if we want to see about the efficacy of FRs as a deterrent to vandalism, let's apply it not to BLPs but to articles about secondary schools, and see if we then see a corresponding decrease in the amount of anon-IP blocks in the period afterwards). Daniel Case (talk) 23:45, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
114. Support; It is only a trial after all... --Deenoe 23:45, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
115. Support. Not an ideal trial, but a necessary first step to broader revision flagging. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 23:47, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
116. Support We need to start investigating other methods of protecting BLPs from libel besides the ineffective semiprotection. Foxy Loxy ^Pounce! 23:48, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
117. Support; this is a good first step. — Coren ^(talk) 23:53, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
118. Support. This could significantly improve Wikipedia. In my experience, the vast majority of IP edits are not constructive, and I think that removing the possibility of 'instant gratification' for vandals would dramatically reduce the appeal of vandalism. All IP edits and edits made by registered users with less than around 100 mainspace contributions should be flagged. I am not persuaded by the argument that this will deter sincere contributions because the people who really want to improve Wikipedia will either create an account so that their contributions are not flagged (after they pass the threshold) or simply accept that their IP edits will be delayed. – SJL 23:55, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
119. Support — it's worth a try, after years of talking. - Mark 00:42, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
120. Support. I'm not entirely confident they'll work, but I think it's worth giving them a limited trial. Judging from the goings-on at perpetually contentious processes such as RfA, the community is rapidly losing its ability to achieve consensus on any substantive change in policy. I think it's important to encourage limited experiments like this so that we can evaluate alternative policies on the basis of actual data, or we will wind up drowning in our own accumulated dogma. Choess (talk) 00:52, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
121. Support, though the mess of new user groups created should probably be simplified before any full-scale implementation. I have always thought, why not let any visitors (including IPs) sight page revisions, and then revisions that have reached a certain threshold can be considered free of vandalism.--Michael White^T·C 01:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
122. --Chris 01:14, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
123. Support - I will support the idea but I don't think this will last long. A testrun on enwiki is what we need :) ...--Cometstyles 01:40, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
124. Support - Due to curiosity; although I dislike the general idea it might be useful with protected and semi-protected pages that are normally off limits.--_ZXCVBNM 02:03, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
125. Support. We need to trial this to really see whether it works and improves things. --Bduke (Discussion) 02:05, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
126. Very Strong Support I like the idea a lot. I always belived in testing, and it will help cut down on vandlism. The vandlism would have to be approved first, like that's gonna happen. I like it. Also, new content can be verifed. Bab (talk) 02:08, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
127. Support. Something along these lines has been needed for several years; vandalism is still rampant on English Wikipedia. If Wikipedia is ever to become a respected encyclopedia, it cannot allow vandalism to continue unchecked. It's my hope that the chosen flaggers will be an intelligent group of individuals who will bring some measure of reliability to the project. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:12, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
128. Support. This seems to be a good plan. I notice that the test page seems to default to showing the draft when not logged in. Otherwise it behaves as expected. Phatom87 ^{(talk • contribs)} 02:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
129. Strong support. This will help to increase the credibility of Wikipedia. TerriersFan (talk) 02:56, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
130. Strongest conceivably possible support. To address those below: a quality control process does not destroy the "anyone can contribute" model. Open source software uses something very similar, where anyone can contribute a patch, but submissions from those who are not well-known to the community have their submissions vetted by someone who's trusted and knows the project well. After enough good submissions, such a person becomes known to the community and becomes one of those trusted members. An analogue to a widely used and generally successful system in open content deserves at least a trial here. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 03:04, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
131. Support - It's overdue. Snappy (talk) 03:17, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
132. Support - Happy to see how a trial goes Camw (talk) 03:28, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
133. Support Barrylb (talk) 04:03, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
134. Very Strong Support - To alleviate the concerns of those who oppose the idea, the trial should start on a small scale and expand from that if it proves to be successful. Flagged revisions has the ability to save editors an awful lot of time by not having to fix up rampant vandalism. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 04:23, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
135. Support I'm not convinced any harm will come of a trial whereas not doing one seems guaranteed to engender issues - and I have issues with issues. -- Banjeboi 04:46, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
136. Support. Everything is speculation until we try it and while a small-scale trial will not address concerns regarding scaling, some insights can be gleaned with a trial than with none at all. --seav (talk) 04:58, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
137. Strong Support. I think this system would go a long way toward improving Wikipedia's credibility. It certainly sounds like a useful idea on paper. It might prove unmanageable, but the only way to know is to actually try. --ThaddeusB (talk) 05:39, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
138. Support. Limited trials of this feature seem like a good idea. I am worried about its potential for harm to the project, but I am also worried (and have been for some time) that the current Wikipedia model may not be stable in the long term (decades, not years). A feature like this could be sufficient to stabilize it, preventing vandalism from degrading articles that do not have sufficient attention from editors.--Srleffler (talk) 06:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
139. Support It's only a trial. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 06:45, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
140. Support, no harm in a trial. If it turns out to be impractical, it can always be rolled back. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 07:06, 4 January 2009 (UTC).
141. Support It's been a long time in coming. Enigma msg 07:39, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
142. Support apart from all theoretical concerns, it already does work well elsewhere (de-wiki, pl-wiki...) Pundit|utter 07:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
143. Support - Support a trial to see how this will work on a practical level. Cirt (talk) 08:25, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
144. Support: Flagged Reviews is an essential tool within the wiki environment. We don't just need to write and revise articles, we also need a fully-reliable way to rate them and present reviewed material to our readers. Implementation of ER is about the maturing of the wiki process. Dovi (talk) 08:37, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
145. Support - providing that there would be an easily-accessible automatically-generated list of which pages had the system enabled... for example, Special:FlaggedPages or something. ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 08:38, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

     We'll get Special:ReviewedPages. Happy‑melon 10:41, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

146. Support - FlaggedRevs would allow semi-protected pages to be unprotected, which would make Wikipedia more open, not less—greenrd (talk) 09:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
147. Support - agree with Dovi just above. If we don't do this we are going to have to stop IPs from editing or, I think, there will be a slippery slide downhill. dougweller (talk) 10:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
148. Support - it's working well on de and pl. Enwiki Exceptionalism doesn't exist. // roux   11:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
149. Support -- and BLP is not the only category which could benefit! I believe unregistered users should generally be under more pressure to register. Macdonald-ross (talk) 11:23, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
150. Support Woody (talk) 11:43, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
151. Support Flagged reviews are necessary to make them more reliable and reduce vandalism.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 11:52, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
152. Support For the reasons stated above. Jon513 (talk) 11:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
153. Strong Support I use de.Wiki a lot and have seen how their system works. It will prevent the juvenile vandalism which is such an embarrassment to Wikipedia. Mikeo1938 (talk) 12:40, 4 January 2009 (UTC) Forgot to mention that the monitor (surveyor?) need not be a full-blown administrator ... just someone with an interest and a feeling of responsibility towards certain pages. Mikeo1938 (talk) 12:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
154. Support with Reservations I concur that all administrators should default to the 'surveyer' capacity, but would also encourage the 'reader' position to be automatically granted to all current and future registered members (if implemented past a trial scenario, obviously). There is, of course, also the Pandora's box aspect of this proposal, wherein one day all articles will use this system. hornoir (talk) 12:56, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
155. Strongly Support A wonderful asset for all BLP articles .Alexnia (talk) 13:10, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
156. Support First, it's a trial so no harm. Second, for those fearing the end of Wikipedia and its spirit- Wikipedia is already stagnating as it is. This new feature may actually contribute to user retention, something nobody seems to be willing to address or even realize as a major problem. Too many good contributors have been leaving simply because they ran out of patience for continuously fixing the articles within their scope of action. Not to mention that flagging could prove extremely effective against vandalism. Húsönd 13:39, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
157. Support for now, with the hopes that this will never be implemented on a whole namespace. It could be usefull as an alternative to page protection however. — Twinzor ^{Say hi!} 14:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
158. Support. Hemmingsen 14:14, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
159. Support Robin klein (talk) 15:29, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
160. Support w/Reservations: I'll support a trial, in the hope that Flagged Revisions are used as an alternative to page protection only when needed (when implemented), not automatically, and that they not extend beyond BLP. Additionally, I would tend to feel that by default, all registered users with some threshold of edits should have monitor/surveyor status, not just administrators. That will hopefully speed up activity, and give editors a extra good reason to register and edit more. Jo7hs2 (talk) 16:04, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
161. Support: Absolutely, a trial in a small scale is a fantastic way to approach this and I'll be excited to see how it pans out. The opposition seems concerned with changing the way things just are, but this type of attitude will not lead to progress and doesn't hold up when the proposal is for a relatively mild trial basis. Nja247 (talk • contribs) 16:42, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
162. Support a trial run on carefully-selected articles. If this is actually implemented, then I would only support it on BLP articles. ~AH1^(TCU) 16:51, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
163. Support idea, oppose this poll Trying flaggedrevs on a subset of articles is a good idea, but this poll would have been better conducted if it actually specified one particular trial to run. GDonato (talk) 17:34, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
164. Generally support a trial of some sort, although it seems weird to me that the immediate outcome of this RfC would seem to me to be...yet another RfC to determine which, if any, trials to run.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:49, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
165. Support This will require refinement in both the tools and the "culture" of WP, but seems like an appropriate and proportionate response to the challenges of maintaining the quality of content here. --Scray (talk) 18:15, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
166. Support While I'm not entirely sold on the concept of FlaggedRevs, I think a trial will be the best way to see how this will work in practice. A few of the issues brought up by the detractors (i.e. the potential for a huge backlog) may or may not actually happen, and with a trial, we can see if they will or not. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 18:23, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
167. Support Captain panda 19:19, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
168. Support this trial. Let's give this a try already. I think the results will be very positive. Mahanga^Talk 20:21, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
169. Support as I see nothing wrong with testing something to see how well it really works. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 20:35, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
170. Meh - Can't hurt to give it a go. -- Cheeseman Muncher (talk) 20:36, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
171. Support - Why not? — D. Wo. 20:37, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
172. Support - Too much user time is spent reverting vandalism to articles whose content should be stable, and such vandalism has serious adverse impacts on Wikipedia's credibility. Just today, I reverted a seriously erroneous change to Behavior modification that had gone unnoticed for several weeks. I often see egregious vandalism to U.S. Census data included in articles about U.S. geographic locations. "Flagged revisions" could reduce the adverse impact of this kind of vandalism. --Orlady (talk) 21:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
173. ayematthew @ 21:19, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
174. Support--Peter Andersen (talk) 21:20, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
175. Weak Support it's a test in it's infancy stage. Slysplace ^{talk ♫} 23:13, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
176. one of the three planks which should be implemented yesterday - yes please :-) Privatemusings (talk) 23:16, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
177. I don't necessarily support FlaggedRevs, but I do support a small, restricted trial. That way we will actually have evidence of how it will affect en Wikipedia, rather that relying on conjecture. My only suggestion would be to grant 'surveyor' to all administrators by default. seresin ( ¡? )  23:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
178. Support Nesseccary to the long term success of wikipedia. Nn123645 (talk) 23:31, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
179. Support - Worth a shot. لennavecia 23:32, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
180. Support a limited trial. Until we try this in practice it isn't really possible to conclude how it will work here so I feel we should give it a go at least. Adambro (talk) 23:33, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
181. Weak Support - I'm not entirely convinced of the practicality of the proposa. I have particular doubts about whether the community as a whole will keep up with reviewing a lot of more esoteric pages. That said, I'd be quite happy to be proven wrong, and we won't know until we try it in the fairly limited way that's proposed. - Chrism would like to hear from you 23:50, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
182. Support - We are learning as we go with this project. This would be one more tool in our tool kit to better understand how to proceed with the Wikipedia project. The more we know the better... E_dog95' ^{Hi '} 00:03, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
183. Support, although the initial trial should be limited to maybe the top 300 articles (by vistits), or to FA articles. OSX (talk • contributions) 00:09, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
184. Support - let's see how it goes. -FrankTobia (talk) 00:42, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
185. Support - but only for BLP's and Semi/Full Protected articles. » \ / (⁂ | ※) 02:52, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
186. Support - It's time to move Wikipedia toward being a more reliable, stable source of information, not one that can be defaced by any passing stranger. -- BlastOButter42 ^See Hear _Speak 03:24, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
187. support - absolutely some trials, and likely the full implementation. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 04:56, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
188. Strong Support; I believe this can serve to improve the perception of Wikipedia and reduce random Vandalism. I would like to see "project" members able to "approve" or "publish" the versions. -- Mjquin_id (talk) 05:10, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
189. Support - Let's give it a try and see if we like it --Megaboz (talk) 05:40, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
190. Support - I agree that this systems seems like it might be better at preventing vandalism than some existing methods. I think that those on both sides of this issue should remember that we are debating a trial and not a full scale roll out, and we should look very carefully at the results of this trial before we consider expanding this system. Optimusnauta (talk) 05:45, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
191. Support - Involve projects. I also hope that the new user rights will not become as 'bereaucratic' as adminship has become. Will be a major incentive to editors adding content and will decrease burn out and frustration among 'good' editors. Great to have a trial before scaling. prashanthns (talk) 06:26, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
192. Support - let's give it a try Mayalld (talk) 07:42, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
193. Support - Flagged revision will help handle a lot of issues, so the sooner we have it implemented the better. I fully support a trial on articles that benefit from it as long as the size of the trial can be handled by the amount of editors involved. - Mgm|^(talk) 09:10, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
194. Support – well worth a trial. If done right, it could work like Mjquin_id says above. /skagedal^talk 09:33, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
195. Support' - Classical geographer (talk) 10:22, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
196. Support Must be done. MBisanz ^talk 13:09, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
197. Support -- lucasbfr ^{ho ho ho} 13:12, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
198. Support - A trial will help answer questions the community has. Awadewit (talk) 14:33, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
199. Support - Let's do it, already! --Cerebellum (talk) 14:41, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
200. Support - Other wikis get it to work, why can't we? The Placebo Effect (talk) ^{How's my editing? Please contribute to my editor review.} 15:15, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Supports 201–300

201. Support - This will clear misconceptions about the process and has already been demonstratedS to have a reasonable degree of success on the German Wikipedia. SBC-YPR (talk) 15:32, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
202. Support - Implement it for now on BLPs, and this will give us the ability to assess it better. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:20, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
203. Support This idea was proposed more than 4 years ago. User:Larry Sanger called it "Sifter". One of the developers wrote a software patch for it, and even got up a test wiki just to showcase it. I never understood why it fizzled. This is only a test. If it has bad results, no harm done, and we will learn something from it. If it works, great! --Uncle Ed (talk) 16:28, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
204. Support It's high time we stopped hypothesizing and had a go at it. --Zvika (talk) 17:45, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
205. Support Absolutely no harm in a trial, and we'll see where this goes. Change can be good. Artichoker^[talk] 17:55, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
206. Support Why not? A trial does no harm. -- Mufka ^{(u) (t) (c)} 18:00, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
207. Support FlaggedRevs and specifically setting up for the planned trials. Splitting the decision between principle and specific details of trials is a good idea, and I note that the quality of the specific proposed trials has improved a lot since this poll started, mainly due to edits by users who (unfortunately) are still opposing this motion. Now we have some feedback on the German experiment and it seems to be scaling OK (>92% of pages currently have their most recent page sighted), and is doing its basic job of shutting out most vandalism. If it was the disaster some are claiming it would have been switched off by now; furthermore, we could configure it better than their current set-up. PaddyLeahy (talk) 18:24, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

     Note: Discussion of PaddyLeahy's statement has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Flagged revisions/Trial#Moved from the voting page as it was getting fairly large. --X-Weinzar (talk) 13:34, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

208. Support as a trial. I think much good can come from this. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 19:05, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
209. Support. --Kbdank71 20:08, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
210. Support: We absolutely do need new tools. A trial is a good idea. Sunray (talk) 20:26, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
211. Support: If it causes the world to abruptly end, we can always just reboot and try again, leaving out progress this time. Kevin Baas^talk 20:42, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
212. Support: Looks good. Let's try this! --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 21:04, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
213. Strong Support: I'm mainly active in the German Wikipedia, where I am also a sysop. FlaggedRevs really improved our quality and I think this can be done here as well --Church of emacs (Talk) 21:16, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

     Could you please explain why you think the quality has really been improved? Please consider how much time could be spent working on articles instead of flagging articles. --X-Weinzar (talk) 15:38, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     The reliability of the quality has greatly improved, as much more vandalism is being detected with FlaggedRevs (which means coordinated control of _all_ edits by non-established users) than without. I've started a (quite large) list with cases of vandalism that have only been detected because of FlaggedRevs. This is an even greater problem on enwiki, as much vandalism is missed in regular CVU. Oh, and articles are flagged mostly by users who do cleanup anyway, so don't worry: there will be enough people still working on writing new articles. --Church of emacs (Talk) 01:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well, if it's your impression that "reliability of the quality has improved greatly" there is no way to challenge this, everyone is entitled to his/her own impressions. However, I'd like to point out that with 40k edits per day (random sample of today, a Wednesday) there will always be some vandalism overlooked by RC patrollers. Also, there will always be vandalism overlooked by "sighters". I could also compile a list of vandalism that has been flagged okay if you're interested. So what does this list prove? Not much, in my opinion. Also, how come you list vandalism that hasn't been detected by CVU within a few minutes but has been detected by "sighters" after a few hours? There are watchlists too, and not everyone is online 24/7. --X-Weinzar (talk) 13:41, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     No one said that FlaggedRevs are a perfect cure for all problems Wikipedia has. Of course there is vandalism that passes sighting, but it is much less than the vandalism that gets undetected in CVU. Watchlists cannot possible handle all vandalism, as there are about 7000 active users (active user=some edits per month) on dewiki, so every user has to check >100 pages for vandalism. That's impossible, especially as watchlists are uncoordinated: One article might be watched by 20 users, another is watched by no user. On the other hand, with FlaggedRevs it is guaranteed, that an article and all changes are sighted at least once. --Church of emacs (Talk) 15:15, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well, we seem to disagree at the very basis: My view is that there was and is no big problem so FlaggedRevs are a solution looking for a problem. --X-Weinzar (talk) 13:46, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

214. Support Rgoodermote  23:01, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
215. Support. Sooner the better. Kaiwhakahaere (talk) 23:18, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
216. Support. It's important that we try this. Basing decisions on guesses is ridiculous, let's get some evidence to work with. -- Earle Martin [^t/_c] 23:20, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
217. Support I am most curious to try this out. That doesn't mean I approve, just life's not worth living without the odd risk. Alientraveller (talk) 00:29, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
218. Support. Neither side of the whole flagged revisions debate will gain any real ground until we get some data. I can't think of a better test methodology than what's proposed here. -- Ken g6 (talk) 00:31, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
219. Support per some arguments above familytree101 (talk) 00:40, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
220. Support Trial needed to refine arguments for or against LeeVJ (talk) 01:57, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
221. Support. This is just a proposal to allow the configuration that will make trials technically possible. Any initial trials will most likely be quite limited in scope, and those trials will be key to determining whether flagged revisions is a good idea or not. Many of the arguments I've seen both for and against flagged revisions are based on what theoretically should happen. However, theoretically speaking, based on what most people assumed before Wikipedia started, Wikipedia could never work. For a project that works only in practice, more empirical evidence of flagged revisions' effect is definitely a good thing. Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 02:09, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
222. Support. Go for it. Alaney2k (talk) 02:15, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
223. Support it has been a very very long time since this extension was developed... At last can we use it? Prodego ^talk 03:03, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
224. Support - Tried the prototype and it seems reasonable. LouScheffer (talk) 04:09, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
225. Support I don't think we have enough editors to double-do everything, and so this is only support for a trial. -SusanLesch (talk) 05:23, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
226. Support - We have to try this out! I love this idea, because it will help us a great deal with the WP:1.0 project, but of course it needs to be done the right way. Walkerma (talk) 05:43, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
227. Support for featured articles. =Nichalp «Talk»= 06:55, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
228. Support. Those who can't even endorse a trial program such as this go through should be swiftly banned from the project. It isn't helpful. JBsupreme (talk) 06:58, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
     • Best. Vote. Ever. "I vote X, and anybody who votes Y should be banned". Sherurcij ^{(speaker for the dead)} 07:17, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
     • Comment: I am a supporter but many of the opposition have provided constructive criticism about the methodology and have been civil in expressing reasonable disagreement about whether the trial is ready to be undertaken. Please be civil in return and respect their opinions. This kind of attitude will only polarize discussion and make the supporters seem unreasonable. Dcoetzee 07:21, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
     • Dude. Chill out. Go look at some pictures of cats. Ozob (talk) 07:25, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
229. Support. If the results of any trials are not to our liking, we can always return to the status quo. But FR may be a real improvement, unlike patrolled pages. Fram (talk) 09:59, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
230. Support, just to enable a trial, the specifics of which I expect will be the subject of further debate. Personally, I'd currently support a single trial on Living People articles. Also I'd prefer users to become reviewers automatically though so that there is less bureaucracy and management overhead.. eug (talk) 10:04, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
231. Support, my experiences with FlaggedRevisions are so far good. --Eivind (t) 10:36, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
232. Support no amount of speculation can beat an experiment. —Ruud 15:04, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
233. Support maybe at first as an alternative to protection, and on featured articles. —Snigbrook 15:44, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
234. Strong Support it is only through trial that its effectiveness can be deturmined. Grika Ⓣ 15:47, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
235. Alpha, Beta and Pilot Testing at first then if sucessful: Implement: plus some way needs to be found to hide defamatory edits too. --Marianian (talk) 15:51, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
236. Support - a trial is a trial is a trial. The community in German wikipedia is very different from the English one in many aspects. After the trial new ideas may emerge. `- 7 bubyon>t 16:24, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
237. Support Subject to expressed limitations. Phil_burnstein (talk) 17:22, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
238. Support -- Xenus (talk) 18:41, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
239. Support: I oppose flagged revisions because I think they're a bad idea. But a trial should show people how good they really are, better or worse. CRGreathouse (t | c) 18:52, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
240. Qualified support. Good alternative to page protection, provided its use is limited to articles where consensus determines that it's clearly and immediately needed - which should be very, very few. Give it a shot. Nothing wrong with a trial. Graymornings_(talk) 18:56, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
241. Suppert. At dewiki it works successfully. --Obersachse (talk) 19:12, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     Could you please explain what you mean by "successfully"? --X-Weinzar (talk) 15:38, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     Isn't it succesfull, when about 90% of all articles are proofed? It means, they are vandal-free, have sources, interwikis and categories. I think, that is very successful. --Obersachse (talk) 13:23, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well, I'm not sure what you are talking about - but it can't be the flagged revisions. "Gesichtete Versionen" is only about not containing "offensichtlichen Vandalismus" (blatant vandalism). Categories, interwikis and sources have nothing to do with this. --X-Weinzar (talk) 13:41, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     Have a look at de:Wikipedia:Gesichtete Versionen#Erstmalige Sichtung von Artikeln. They recomend also to check/add sources and fix little problems. --Obersachse (talk) 09:24, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well yes, they recommend it: That's the difference. Just hit "Random article" a few times to see how many of the flagged articles actually have no sources. --X-Weinzar (talk) 13:34, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

242. Support. We should've done this ages ago. Increased accountability and oversight can only be a good thing.--Hemlock Martinis (talk) 19:21, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
243. Strong Support. Pretty please. The future of the human race depends on this. Kaldari (talk) 20:17, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
244. Support. This is absolutely needed to maintain the quality of articles as they are constantly edited and improved. Letsgoridebikes (talk) 20:34, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     The system of "anyone can edit (almost) anything and see his/her changes immediately" has worked great so far. Why change it now? --X-Weinzar (talk) 15:38, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

245. Support (and I did strongly oppose) on the condition that no reader article grading (think YouTube) is introduced. At all. J Milburn (talk) 20:46, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
246. Support Happy to support trial, although eventually would probably only support for small subset of articles. Suicidalhamster (talk) 22:15, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
247. Support - wikipedia is now large enough that this feature can be supported. That said I think this will have less of an impact then most people think. --T-rex 23:24, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     Support changing position to oppose as currently implemented in the demo link - see my entry under opposed - but I do still agree with the rest of my original post that follows: - Testing is the only real way to come up with a rational decision as to will it work or not, or will it help or hurt. With limited testing having the least posible negative impact should things not workout as advertised. Dbiel ^(Talk) 02:46, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

248. Support - WP would benefit from incorperating aspects of content management systems. Its worth trying, cautiously, to determine if it can be done well.--Thesoxlost (talk) 03:45, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
249. Support as it works perfectly on de.wiki — Jan Hofmann (talk) 04:13, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     Works perfectly? 1 in 5 editors in de.wp left the project because of this. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:39, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     Works perfectly? Right, editors have to wait up to 20 days to see their changes approved or refused. I wouldn't exactly say it's a mess but I suggest you explain what led you to the conlusion that it works perfectly. On the other hand I'd love to have a source for "1 out of 5 have left". You can't just throw in such a number Without a source or at least some explanation. While there have been heavy debates (and still are going on) whether it is a success or not I doubt that 1 out of 5 (!!) have left the project. --X-Weinzar (talk) 09:31, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     I was under the assumption that once you have become an autoconfirmed editor [I don't know de.wiki's requirements] your edits appear instantly. — Jan Hofmann (talk) 10:48, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     Oh okay, it does work from the technical point of view, that's what you mean I guess. However, the question to be addressed is whether it's useful overall. And I'm not talking about my contributions but about how anonymous editors will be discouraged from editing. --X-Weinzar (talk) 14:32, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

250. Support. I believe that anonymous (not logged in) editing should be disabled, so implementing a bit of an article review process is definitely a good idea, especially if it is only a trial. —Gordon P. Hemsley→✉ 08:00, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
251. Support Absolutely we need a trial. I know that most IP edits are of value, but there are some articles where that is not the case. ϢereSpielChequers 10:21, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     That's what semi-protection is there for. IPs can place their suggestions on the talk page. --X-Weinzar (talk) 14:36, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

252. Strong Support This is why it was created, no harm at all in a trial. Timmccloud (talk) 15:00, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
253. Support - While WP is "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", it is clearly a double-edged sword. I think if we discouraged the "any anon IP can insert whatever into articles and see it immediately" aspect of WP, I think we could reduce the amount of oversighting requests, BLP problems, and even edit warring, because the "holding pen" before approving edits would moot the purpose of fighting on the articles directly. It will be far more useful for some articles than for others, but it should at least be tried. MSJapan (talk) 17:52, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
254. Support Definitely worth a trial, and has the potential to improve overall quality. JavaTenor (talk) 18:35, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
255. Support Eusebeus (talk) 19:47, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
256. Support For all that we may learn from giving it a limited try. Mfield (talk) 21:56, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
257. Get on with it. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 23:28, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
258. Support, this should have been done ages ago. -- Visviva (talk) 02:15, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
259. Strong support. Andre (talk) 02:40, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
260. Support A trial won't hurt. --Russavia ^Dialogue 06:59, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
261. krimpet✽ 07:35, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
262. Absolutely. The oppose reasons are completely unconvincing. A test would be very useful. Tombomp (talk/contribs) 10:51, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
263. Support - we've been discussing this for years. Let's run a trial, then the debate can finally move forward; we'll have some actual evidence as to whether flagged revisions are desirable and, if so, how best to implement them more widely. Warofdreams talk 11:11, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
264. Support a trial. Mosheroni (talk) 13:18, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
265. Secret ^account 13:58, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
266. Support a restricted trial, certainly. I'm rather sceptical but I would quite like a trial on BLPs. --Cameron* 15:10, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
267. Support a trial. Vandalism should be dealt with by reverting the bad edits, and blocking or banning the vandals, not by protecting pages (except possibly in extreme cases). I believe that page protection is used far too much today. I expect that Flagged Revisions will make it easier to deal with vandalism, and will reduce the incentive to use page protection. A trial, or several trials, will enable us to figure out whether Flagged Revisions are useful. —AlanBarrett (talk) 17:48, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

     Protection is not only applied for vandalism. And only in extreme cases of vandalism are pages protected. MickMacNee (talk) 18:37, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

268. Support with Conditions - Before this trial commences, I would like to see the following in place:

     • Start and end dates.
     • Planned target articles, definitions of what the selection criteria is, what the process will be for adding/removing articles from trial scope
     • Plan on how the user experience will be managed during the trial (article notices etc)
     • Defined success/failure criteria
     • Defined emergency escape criteria
     • Risk assesment - server/infrastructure, admin/maintenance, backlogs, user/editor experience
     • Defined user/editor processes the feature will create
     • Defined changes to existing user/editor/admin processes

     You may wish to respond to these points on my talk page. Many thanks, Gazimoff 17:55, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

269. Support alanyst ^/talk/ 18:46, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
270. Support - From my experience in RC patrolling, there is a dire need for such a mechanism in sensitive articles (such as BLPs). Gail (talk) 20:59, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
271. support - give it a go, see what happens William M. Connolley (talk) 23:42, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
272. Support - Zginder 2009-01-09T03:57Z (UTC)
273. Support - I'm frequently seeing libel that goes for hours or days or longer without being reverted. This is not an acceptable situation. This is the type of thing that just needs to be implemented by fiat by the foundation rather than to continue to allow "wiki purists" to stifle progress. --B (talk) 05:09, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     reply It is not "wiki puritism" making me oppose. This proposal means the "anyone can edit" line is, effectively, no longer true. This proposal takes what makes Wiki so attractive and turns it ugly. I would assume, with respect, that your examples of month long unchecked libel is not accurate. doktorb _words^deeds 05:15, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     You are assuming that libel only comes from IPs. You are assuming that assessing libel is only ever simple and black and white issue. You are assuming that libeled subjects do not have access to registered accounts and will find it any more "acceptable" that they can only be libeled for 4 days or more in front of thousands of registered users, or that they would be any less likely to seek redress. If the issue is truly libel, and this is not just a poster child for closing up the project, then we should take full measures that actually address the problem, and not merely take half measures that sweep it under the carpet. How many users for instance regularly take on the task of copyeditting BLP articles tagged as unreferenced? Is it "acceptable" to have an unreferenced BLP article at all? Only as long as it is not visible to the outside? MickMacNee (talk) 16:02, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

274. Support - Some opposers object because they say it violates anyone can edit but f.r. won't stop anyone from editing just that what becomes live to the world will be delayed until reviewed. I think this is especially needed for biographies due to the possible harm that could be caused. It's a simple trial and it would give those of us curious about it a much better gauge of its effectiveness, pros/cons. RedWolf (talk) 06:57, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
275. Support, I have some issues with the cosmetics of how FR is presented, but from a technical point of view it seems potentially helpful. Far better than simply protecting or semi-protecting a page. —Locke Cole • t • c 09:10, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
276. Support - We are the biggest online encyclopedia in the world, and must have certain standards to what content is added accordingly (especially very sensitive articles). Vandalism rates dropping will allow more editors to focus on furthering the cause. This hopefully will increase the credibility Wikipedia has in the community. Full support. If there are problems with the F.R's, we will see them, catch them, and respond to them.
277. Support. So far so good with my experiences on de-wp. The risk of a good-faith edit failing to show up for a week or so is more than compensated for by the virtually complete elimination of visible vandalism. I frequently encounter vandalism here that has gone unreverted for months on end, typically because it was quickly followed by a good-faith edit made by someone who hadn't noticed the vandalism, and all that shows up on people's watchlists is the most recent edit. If FR work here the way they do at de-wp, that won't happen, because all revisions have to be checked before the page can go live. And the "anyone can edit" principle is not impaired even remotely; I really fail to understand that argument. —Angr 14:41, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     From my perspective, most of the people who simply 'cannot see a problem' with FR (rather than those would want a trial to assess it) are entrenched experienced Wikipedia users who see everything in terms of how it affects their watchlist or their user experience (see above, there are plenty of examples of this), and take their existence as a registered user as representative of Wikipedia contributors as a whole, without any appreciation that instantaneous (not delayed or subject to approval) IP editing is (was?) a fundemental feature of Wikipedia. I have no problem delaying/interfering/confusing that feature if it can be shown that the obvious benefits of it (drawing in new users, the ease of use, the perception as an open unbeaurocratic project, the instant correction of non-vandalism factual errors by IPs etc etc) are not wiped out by FR for the benefits to registered users lives. And frankly, I am uncomfortable with a delay of hours, if we are honestly saying it is more like weeks based on an already implemented practical example, I would certainly never have bothered signing up to Wikipedia. MickMacNee (talk) 15:42, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Imho it should not be about registered vs unregistred users, but about readers and the product. If FR prove overall beneficial to the quality/content of WP and its readers you them otherwise don't. However the only way to find out is a test run.--Kmhkmh (talk) 16:41, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Mick, I do appreciate that instantly appearing IP editing is a traditional feature of Wikipedia, but full protection and semiprotection - both of which have long been fully implemented - interfere with that feature to a much greater extent than flagged revisions do. And whether the revision goes live in minutes or weeks depends on how highly watched the article in question is. Pages that are on a lot of people's watchlists will have their changes flagged very quickly; pages that are on few people's watchlists may have to wait somewhat longer. I suspect that things will move faster here than they do on de-wp simply because there are so many more active logged-in users here than there. —Angr 16:48, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     This is making several assumptions about the benefits of FR based on conflicting implementations. If it is only applied to protected articles, you are not preventing vandalism very much as a percentage of all articles. And protection is not done simply for vandalism, so it will not be able to be wholly removed just because FR is applied. If it is applied to all articles, you are inconveniencing by a massive factor IPs more than protection does right now, and that is before we even get into the sublte difference in interaction with new users between the active process of requesting an edit to a protected article, and the try it and see aspect of FR. And just because we have more users, does not mean that we don't have hundreds of thousands of articles wih less than 5 people watching them. These reviews will definitely require putting in a pool of unreviewed pages. MickMacNee (talk) 17:07, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well, for the test version of FR, we'll have to see whether they're only applied to (semi)protected pages or how the test works, but of course a full-fledged version of FR would apply to all pages, and would hopefully (and probably) reduce the total number of pages that would have to be semiprotected. (No one ever said FR would completely obviate (semi)protection.) But flagged revisions don't inconvenience IPs at all, and don't inconvenience registered regulars any more than RC and watchlist patrolling already do. The "pool of unreviewed pages" can stay where it's always been, at Special:RecentChanges. —Angr 20:44, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     I don't think we have the same definition of inconvenience, for IP users or registered users (not all registered users will be Reviewers). In fact, users who never feel the collective burden that drives people to patrol, but gain Reviewer status anyway, will positively benefit, at the expense of IPs and non-Reviewers, even though all are supposedly still equal stakeholders when it comes to building content. MickMacNee (talk) 01:44, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

278. Support - having worked with them on the German wikipedia my overall experience is positive so far.--Kmhkmh
279. Strong support - there's a reason why so many people distrust Wikipedia's verifiability, and why so many people will not allow Wikipedia to grow any further as a trustworthy encyclopedia. Seeing the phrase 'the encyclopedia anyone can edit' automatically puts some people off, whilst drawing others in (for the right reasons or the wrong) -- I think the idea of flagged revisions is perfect for helping iron out those things that bring down our reputation. ≈ The Haunted Angel 16:59, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     That depends on whether the FR process will come anywhere near to ensuring an article meets the principle of verifiability. If the review process starts to resemble the GA/FA review process, where these things are properly checked, then why pretend FR is anything other than an upfront enforced QA system, disbarring any well meaning edits made by newcomers who are not experienced in policy. If the FR process is simply meant to be a seconds long check for blatant vandalism, then obviously anyone who then thinks Wikipedia is more verifiable because FR exists is going to to be sadly dissappointed if they do even the most cursory of investiagations. If the goals is to highlight to readers potentially untrustworthy edits, rather than implement FR, we may as well code the interface to add {citation-needed} or {verify me} to the end of any text added to an article by an IP user. MickMacNee (talk) 17:26, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     I guess we won't know unless we have a trial where verifiability is included in the parameters. If we don't, we'll see no improvement in the respect on other trials and be able to move on with our lives without FR. But you gotta trial it first :) Fritzpoll (talk) 17:36, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

280. Strong Support Like The Haunted Angel mentioned, this will transition Wikipedia from an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, to one where anyone can propose edits which is really what is required by the academic community. Furthermore, one can hope that this feature will remove the need for article protection, which really is censorship. -- KelleyCook (talk) 18:34, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
281. Support The great is the enemy of the good. This is a reasonable step for BLPs, and worthy of a trial on a subset of those. If the problems predicted below materialize, we can drop it. However, the potential benefits are significant, and worthy of the attempt. Xymmax ^{So let it be written} _{So let it be done} 20:38, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
282. Support: BLP is an issue we need to address, not before time. This tool can reduce the drive-by problem there significantly. That argument is within the traditional way here, of stepwise coping with real issues that can threaten the project. Charles Matthews (talk) 21:38, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
283. Support - provided that the trial conditions are properly set this seems a good way forward. The problems foreseen by the opposers may or may not manifest themselves but that is the reason for a trial. Better we trial and see if there are net benefits than not trial and never know. Smile a While (talk) 22:20, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
284. Weak Support As a replacement to semi-protection.--Res2216firestar 22:28, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
285. Weak Support As a replacement to semi-protection --GeometryGirl (talk) 22:42, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
286. Support It would be good to try this. It may have very good effects in the long run. --Bwwm (talk) 01:11, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
287. Support Anything that will control the chaos on BLP's would help. A 'known good' page link will be a useful tool. Mytwocents (talk) 02:24, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
288. Support. It is time to start learning things rather than theorizing about how Flagged revisions will work. Mangojuice^talk 06:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
289. Strong Support - missed vandalism (RC) like [1] must not happen, but does often enough (there are more and better (respectively 'worse') examples, I just cannot find them in my logs right now, but you all know anyway wow: it turned out that the article actually is a real prime example, absolute negative); finding vandalism by coincidence is not acceptable! --Melancholie (talk) 07:30, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

     Vandalism on such an insignificant article isn't of importance. If we did FlagRev on all articles, there would not be enough manpower to validate the onslaught of edits; most of which are fine. - RoyBoy 16:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

     It was but only ONE example that the editor pulled out. I am sure there are more damaging instances of vandalism that is not reverted promptly. With FR vandalism will be reduced significantly. This will free up editing time to validate edits. If trusted editors are given the ability to edit articles that are immediately flagged as sighted there will be less of a need to validate edits. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 10:28, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

290. Support --Jan eissfeldt (talk) 09:27, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
291. Support 211.30.119.55 (talk) 11:14, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
292. Strong Support - due to positive experience in the German Wikipedia. Raymond (talk) 12:22, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
293. Tentative support as a great idea on paper, but with the minor caveat that due to the inertia that often seems to develop with these things, a 'trial' that goes badly may be more difficult to undo and cause more damage than we might anticipate. EyeSerene^talk 13:33, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
294. Support with the addition to automatically publish some articles after a certain time if no one have cleared the flag. --Jimmy Bergmark (talk) 14:39, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
295. Support I am curious to see how well this will work, and how it won't work. Quality Control needs to be taken seriously, and fast reverting cannot also always be counted on, even for heavily trafficked articles. - RoyBoy 16:49, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
296. I am opposed to the smearing of innocent living people (and many other article subjects). Therefore I support this. Giggy (talk) 23:28, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
297. Support, yes. James F. (talk) 00:07, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
298. Support. But as I said on the live experiment test page, I think each edit on a flagged revision page should need two sets of eyes to see it before it goes live. This will happen, as the test page is set up now, if the initial edit is made by an anon/IP editor. It will have to be reviewed and approved (i.e. "sighted") by someone with a user account.
     But, as the test page is currently set up, someone with a user account can approve ("sight") his/her own edit. If flagged revs is to be fair, even a user's edit should be reviewed by another user before it goes live. One should not be able to approve one's own edit on a flagged rev page. David in DC (talk) 00:24, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
299. Support Lets try this Ziphon (^ALL_ears) 11:25, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Supports 301–400

301. — CharlotteWebb 01:16, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
302. Support. Allows us to make selected pages flagged-revisions pages, instead of semi-protected or protected. We'll probably be able to unprotect the Main Page! ☺Coppertwig(talk) 01:27, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
303. Support. From my (very limited) experience watching Flagged Revisions on the German Wikipedia and the test English wikipedia, I think it is a good idea. Soap ^Talk/_{Contributions} 01:31, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
304. Support. A trial will keep things fresh. Pretzels^Talk! 02:35, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
305. Support. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 03:47, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
306. Support, with reservations. Try it, and see what happens, although I'm concerned about what happens if a backlog of accurate non-sighted edits piles up. Musashi1600 (talk) 07:05, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
307. My main activity takes place in Russian Wikipedia, where revisions have been switched on. There flagged revisions are very useful. In English Wikipedia they will be useful too, I think. Deevrod (talk) 10:08, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
308. Support – I thought it was a great idea when I saw it being used on the German Wikipedia, and I still do. MTC (talk) 10:11, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
309. Support - I am a Wikipedian mostly active in the German language edition and based on my experience and the problems I see at en.wp (especially the huge feedback OTRS gets in cases of high-profile stupid vandalism, such as racist slurs in US president elect Barack Obama's page now and then), I support this trial. -- Mathias Schindler (talk) 10:55, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
310. Support - Something like this could help with Wikipedia's horrible reliability problems... --KFP (talk | contribs) 16:38, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
311. Support. This mechanism has proven its efficincy in German and Russian Wikipedias, and should bring English Wikipedia to new level of quality — VasilievV ² 17:44, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
312. Support. It works for Russian and German Wikipedia — why it shouldn't work here? --Grebenkov (talk) 17:51, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
313. Support with reservations A limited trial sounds fine, but a huge backlog of edits waiting to be checked could lead to major problems down the road. Joshdboz (talk) 18:30, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
314. Support. We will never know if it works for enwiki without trying it. --Alvestrand (talk) 21:34, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
315. Support trial - informed discussion is impossible until we've seen how it works in practise. Let's have a test run before we decide whether or not to keep it. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:16, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
316. It's proven itself on the German Wikipedia; we ourselves are the only things preventing it from proving itself here. —Animum (talk) 22:44, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
317. Strong Support: It'd make oversight of WP by those who care incredibly more manageable if they could be relieved of patrolling for vandals and other such edits. This definitely deserves a trial. -- btphelps ^{(talk) (contribs)} 00:22, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
318. Support: It sounds like a great idea. It also sounds like a terrible idea. The difference, it seems, will be in implementation and whether the results are as expected. For that we need to burn it in and have a trial, without prejudice to whether we keep the system or not. In other words, we should enable it and try it out for a few months but it should require consensus to continue widespread use or greatly expand. Wikidemon (talk) 00:27, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
319. Support. If Wikipedia ever wants to be actually considered as an encyclopedia, and not just as a large entertainment webite, then it needs some content control processes like this one. Cla68 (talk) 01:32, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
320. Support. Only by putting this experiment into action on a limited basis will we learn its potential value (or lack thereof).--Pharos (talk) 02:02, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
321. Support. It's a trial -- let's see how it goes and then see if this is the end of the world or not. Jpatokal (talk) 03:13, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
322. Support - Gtstricky^{Talk or C} 04:20, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
323. Support — I am mainly working on the German wikipedia where flagged revisions have been successfully implemented and where they help to find vandalisms which would otherwise survive for considerable time periods (see comment by Church of emacs above). At the English wikipedia I came across articles which were vandalized for more than a year without anyone taking care of as they were apparently on no one's watchlist. Flagged revisions allow to find all these vandalisms in a colaborative way without missing anything. --AFBorchert (talk) 07:38, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
324. Support, too much "hidden" vandalism never gets checked/corrected. As are, a.o. changes of numbers, e.g. numbers of citizen in articles on settlements. --Matthiasb (talk) 12:14, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
325. Support  Misarxist 12:59, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
326. Support Muro de Aguas (write me) 16:53, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
327. Support Hroyer (talk) 17:04, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
328. We're the encyclopædia that anybody can edit, yes—but I'd rather be "the encyclopedia that is free of nonsense and vandalism." If Wikipedia is to ever completely shake off its poor-reliability image—an image the public quite resoundingly hold of us, no matter how much we may wish otherwise, FlaggedRevs is a must. Support, most strongly. AGK 17:28, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     You will be pleased to know that in the five high schools I frequent, students give Wikipedia a resounding endorsement. Invariably their first response to settle debates and answer questions is "look it up on Wikipedia." That phrase is never followed by another person saying anything like "Wikipedia is not reliable." And I've never heard them say "look it up in Britannica." It is always Wikipedia. Some teachers, of course, are skeptical to the extent that they forbid Wikipedia as part of any conversation, and others are skeptical to the extent that they recommend double checking Wikipedia's information. Personally, I encourage students to use Wikipedia and even to edit Wikipedia - but I don't let them use Wikipedia as a source - not because it is Wikipedia, but because I don't let any encyclopedias pass as viable sources. But I digress. My point is that Wikipedia has a very good reputation among the general public that I encounter. Not only students, but employees I worked with at a call center and people I meet at parties. They all love Wikipedia. I'm not kidding. I never bring Wikipedia up in conversation. Other people often do, and because they use it and enjoy it. Kingturtle (talk) 18:28, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

329. Support We really need to do a trial and see what happens. All the FUD over what will happen to WP if it's implemented is just that. We don't know for certain until we have some data, so we should gather it. Sχeptomaniac^{χαιρετε} 20:38, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
330. Support--Pokeronskis (talk) 20:43, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
331. Support Anyone can edit; that doesn't mean anyone can insist on having their version displayed. --Russ (talk) 21:54, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
332. Face it, our anti-vandalism efforts have effectively stagnated for many years now. The only way to make further headway against the problem is something like flagged revisions. We don't need to put up with the status quo of persistent vandalism; things can be better. --Cyde Weys 23:38, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
333. Support...I think we've covered just about every reason...LittleNuccio (talk) 00:11, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
334. Support. This still allows everyone to edit, while helping fight vandalism. A good compromise. Schutz (talk) 12:05, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
335. Support A must-have feature. Let's take this important step towards a more reliable wiki. NCurse _work 19:50, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
336. Strong Support. Instituting Flagged Revisions is one of the best changes Wikipedia could make, and in a single step would do a great deal to solve our biggest problems. I support anything that gets us closer to that goal. Terraxos (talk) 21:35, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
337. Support trial. -Atmoz (talk) 22:07, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
338. Support - Interested to see what will happen. I have serious doubts that this system could ever be effectively implemented. In most projects there are thousands of articles per active editor. Charles Edward (Talk) 23:09, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
339. Support this isn't the perfect implementation but I think it's a start. We need some implementation of this mediawiki plugin on Wikipedia in order to increase the reliability of articles and minimize the effects of vandalism. gren グレン 00:12, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
340. Support As long as it is a true trial, with a sunset clause, I see no harm in it. As Wikipedia articles proliferate, I am seeing subtle vandalism being taken as fact on a number of sites. Perhaps this is a step towards curbing that. Ultimately, I think we will need to move away from anonymous editing, but that is a different discussion.Seaphoto^Talk 00:49, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
341. Support. What we need. A trial run shouldn't do any harm. utcursch | talk 02:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
342. Support. Recommended reading: the Report on Flagged Revisions, December 14, 2008 which is linked in Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-10/News and notes. — Athaenara ✉ 03:40, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
343. Support. I've thought as much ever since witnessing the scope of 4chan vandalism first hand - there are kids out there who study hoax articles in an effort to make their slanderous content stick. Ottre 03:49, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
344. Support I don't have anything to add that hasn't already been said. Tuf-Kat (talk) 04:05, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
345. Support, for a more reliable Wikipedia.--Yamanbaiia^{(free hugs!)} 11:18, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
346. Support could fix many problems that we are currently experiencing. LK (talk) 16:44, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
347. Support - While I understand the concern of those opposing it, the truth is that our anti-vandalism measures have failed. Lately, I have noticed how blantant vandalism that was easily sniped a year ago, just began slipping away from RCP, establishing itself for some time. Although not perfect, this could help those that try to keep a few dozen GA/FAs under control and up to standards. - Caribbean~H.Q. 19:32, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
348. Support. feydey (talk) 20:20, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
349. Support. Backed by my experiences on German WP. --Jo (talk) 20:43, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
350. Support. —Borgarde 21:33, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
351. Support. — Ned Blue (talk) 23:16, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
352. Support A trial is only temporary so if it is not successful in its aims (stability and preventing vandalism) we do not have to pursue it further. Gizza^{Discuss ©} 23:45, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
353. Support, too much hidden vandalism never gets checked/corrected. The reliability of Wikipedia should be our priority. Backed by my expperience with Polish Wikipedia flagged revisions Mieciu K (talk) 23:58, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
354. Support 1. It's a trial. 2. Editors who don't like the feature can simply not use it. 3. I've run across many instances recently that show how vandals have become more "intelligent" in their vandalism by inserting false information into articles that may be difficult to verify or disprove. ++Arx Fortis (talk) 04:21, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
355. Support A trial will clear up many misconceptions on Flagged Revisions (see below for example). If it doesn't work, we can just remove it. Jkasd 08:15, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
356. Support bout only for a trial, so we can see if it is ok or not. If it is, implement it within one year. If not, do not implement it. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 09:37, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
357. Support – meh, I have my misgivings (especially on whether it's practically feasible), but a trial can't hurt. Love the general idea behind them though. — sephiroth bcr ^(converse) 11:34, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
358. Support Not emphatic, but I think this is the best/better method. --Dumarest (talk) 16:12, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
359. Support, just. I was going to oppose this at first as going against Wikipedia principles of being something anyone can edit. However the fact is vandalism remains, this is a trial, and if we don't try we will never know – so I'm happy to give it a try (even if it ends up being the worst invention since unsliced bread). :p Rambo's Revenge (talk) 20:04, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
360. Strong support I think this has the potential to significantly improve quality control on Wikipedia. There are many casual users who refuse to utilise this project because the quality of articles is not ascertainable to most. A trial would at least test if this will help such issues. DJLayton4 (talk) 22:08, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
361. Support I'm interested to see how the trial will turn out. Spellcast (talk) 22:41, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
362. Support Improves the quality for readers at the price of slithgly less "instant gratification" for IP editors. If their edits are good, they will get reviewed, just not within a fixed deadline (as is the case for everything in Wikipedia). --Latebird (talk) 00:14, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
363. Support: let us machinate together! --Bobak (talk) 01:49, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
364. Support —Chris! _ct 02:19, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
365. Support --Sopoforic (talk) 05:53, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
366. Support Let us see what it is so we can decide. Calimo (talk) 07:54, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
367. Strong support Per using it with Wikinews. Calebrw (talk) 15:24, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
368. Strong support (Caniago (talk) 15:57, 16 January 2009 (UTC))
369. Support - Let's try it and see how it works. Then we can decide whether to use this system across the entire site. Giants2008 (17-14) 16:40, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
370. — Xenus (talk) 17:25, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
371. Support Let's try it and see what happens. Arnie Side (talk) 20:08, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
372. Support Is anyone reading the comments any more? Lampman (talk) 23:04, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
373. Support - The test will provide plenty of opportunity for reconsideration, but it is hard to imagine failing to come up with a flavor of FV that will be valuable. I have some thot that it might be valuable for IPs to be able to override the default and see the unsighted versions (probably with a banner at the top warning them not to forget they overrode the default). But that's a detail, and the basic concept is promising.
     --Jerzy•t 06:29, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
     
374. Support —  Tivedshambo  _(t/c) 09:00, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
375. Support For a trial, preferably timeboxed with a review point decided before we start. It seems to be a good idea, and the concerns about wait times on a larger project can be relatively quickly put to bed. --Deadly∀ssassin 13:45, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
376. Support as an experiment. It's better than protecting pages. Cyclopaedic (talk) 18:51, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
377. Support - Techman224^Talk 00:06, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
378. Support - A "SAY NO TO FLAGGED REVISIONS" annoying little lower right corner image brought me here, I thought I'd already voted on this once before. We can do this voluntarily, or we can do it after the WMF gets sued again for the NEXT Siegenthaler incident (whatever it might be). I choose voluntarily. ++Lar: t/c 02:55, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
379. Support GLaDOS (talk) 05:01, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
380. Support Knowing that it worked on the German Wikipedia. lomis (talk) 14:13, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
381. Support This is a piece of what is essential for Wikipedia to meet the challenges of scale and at the same time improve reliability.--Abd (talk) 16:26, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
382. Support Anything that keeps wiki available to all and stops unnecessary traffic/time wasting is good for the community and to test is a necessary function of evaluation Chaosdruid (talk) 19:44, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
383. Support per Lar. I came here from the same corner image. hbent (talk) 20:20, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
384. Support. Sam Blacketer (talk) 22:19, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
385. Support -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 00:43, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
386. Support - although it seems that this might increase the burden on the system and the amount of time we are locked out from editing.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 18:44, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
387. Support - let's give it a go, and see what happens with a trial. Anything to reduce vandalism from Anons Major Bloodnok (talk) 20:13, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
388. Support - it's only common sense to do this, and it makes no sense to give vandals immediate publication. This is a sensible way to stop that. Andreclos (talk) 22:46, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
389. Weak Support - the bots will catch most of the vandals. We could still use this, however M1N (talk) 00:15, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
390. Support. I want to see how this trial work out. I suspect it will be unpopular - however, we will (hopefully) see. Bsimmons666 (talk) 01:11, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
391. Support but... it's worth mentioning that this trial has very little that could go wrong with it (except technical issues which can be fixed easily) and will thus be a huge success for those who support flagged revisions. Let's keep in mind that it will not address some of the major issues and problems that may arise if flagged revisions are fully implemented. 2help (talk) 03:27, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
392. Support The road to chavel is paved with hope. From a marketing outlook, flagged revisions would likely help Wikipedia as a product, at least for awhile. The proposed permissions could skew Wikipedia's systemic bias more than ever, through a kind of meta WP:OWN. Either way though, the biggest weaknesses which do show up will, as ever, trace back to cited secondary sources and how they've been gathered. Consensus and popularity in themselves don't stir up helpful, falsifiable notions, but neither do editorial boards. Only a free market of thought (or for a tertiary source like Wikipedia, a free market of sourcing) can do this. Free markets can be messy and flawed, but that's the pith. What we see as chaos will always have more sway than our own feeble notions of order, because chaos is much more thoroughly put together. It comes down to how much trust can be put in readers to read text drawn from a wide array of sources and think for themselves. I think most readers can be trusted to do this. I also have worries about instruction creep, not only for new users, but owing to how it all could be gamed, skewing content even further. Given that many editors think the time has come for some kind of vetting scheme, there's a need to have some meaningful hints as to what the outcome of such a thing would be, hence a test will be helpful. Gwen Gale (talk) 04:35, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
393. Support Those who are concerned that flagged revisions will spoil the instant gratification/thrill of wiki-editing need to grow up. Though not a perfect solution, flagged revisions would promote a culture of increased respectability/responsibility.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 04:59, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
394. Support – This will increase the encyclopedia's reputation while at the same time allowing anons to edit articles that were fully-protected in the past. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:18, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
395. Support trial This could certainly increase our reliability, and the current protection system has too many flaws. I'm worried that flagged revisions would add too much bureaucracy and slow things down, but it's worth a shot. There's no better way than a trial to find out if flagged revisions are right for us. --TeeRebel (talk) 20:39, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
396. Support --Stefan ^talk 00:00, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
397. Support - This will help increase our articles' quality, since many articles are poor stubs that aren't expanded. Also, our featured articles vary (from super good to maybe). This can help us determine good/featured articles. MathCool10 ^{Sign here!} 06:04, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
398. Support -- Knverma (talk) 08:40, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Oppose

Opposes 1–100

1. — Aitias // discussion 18:04, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
2. to conduct one or more trials is to vague Mion (talk) 18:13, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   Each trial will require a separate consensus; we can support or oppose each on separately. This proposal is just to give us the technical ability to conduct any trials at all. Happy‑melon 18:20, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   If the first trial request fails support by the community there is no reason to implement the configuration ? Mion (talk) 18:28, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   There is if the second request succeeds. If every request fails then the implementation remains completely unusable, so does no damage. We can implement the technical changes without committing ourselves to actually doing any trials, but we can't do any trials without the technical changes, so it makes eminent sense to do the changes first before getting into the details of specific trials. Happy‑melon 18:49, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   IF the second request for a trail succeeds, its early enough for this vote, you save the energy of doing the unusable implementation ?Mion (talk) 18:58, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   I don't see your point. If the first, or second, or third, or fourth, or nth trial gains consensus, we will need this implementation. So we would need to have this discussion and straw poll in any of those instances. If none of the trial proposals gain consensus, there is no harm whatsoever done by having this extension inactive in the background. 99% of the "energy" required to implement this proposal has already been expended, the effort required to finish it off is trivial. It would actually be more effort to not proceed with this proposal than to continue. Happy‑melon 19:04, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   I trust this is not a declaration of intent to poll until you get your way; but the implementation is unnecessary, and undesirable, until there is consensus on how to implement it.Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:10, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   Certainly not; "my way", like everyone else's personal preference for FlaggedRevs, is one distinct set of policies that I suspect is going to be one of the more popular trial choices. If it fails to gain consensus, "I" have nothing to gain from proposing a myriad of variations. But the reason the general FlaggedRevs discussion has run round in circles for the past six months is because every man and his dog has "his way" and dearly wanted wikipedia to implement it as our one-and-only shot at FlaggedRevisions, thereby splitting the "general support for some implementation of FlaggedRevs" camp into dozens of parts. With this proposal, we can ask everyone to cough up their ideas again, have a think about which ones might be the best, even try the top few to see how they work. Then we can make an informed decision about which one, if any, is best for wikipedia, and how (if) to deploy it. I have seen no reasoning whatsoever to suggest that having this implementation without a consensus to use would be in any way "undesirable". Happy‑melon 22:36, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

3. Very Strongly oppose. The fundamental problem with flagging is a problem of scale, as explained here; this "test" avoids the real questions (although it would be fascinating, and unsurprising, if flagging proved to be ineffective even at the small scale.) In addition, the creation of a new flag for sub-admin status is another step of bureaucracy and ego, which we have always consistently opposed. See also #bots? and #neither test please, below. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:08, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   I agree that this proposal does not consider many of the questions that we need answers for before deciding on a final implementation of FlaggedRevs. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to provide evidence to inform us when we make those decisions. It would indeed be fascinating to see that flagging proved ineffective in the trials. I think we should be given the opportunity to see for ourselves. In regards your other reason, I point you in the direction of rollback, IPBE, account-creator... we don't seem to have opposed the creation of additional user groups very "consistently" so far. Happy‑melon 23:29, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   Then it's not ready. This poll is about two things confounded: whether to have a test at all (which I would support) and whether to use this structure, which I absolutely oppose. Most of the support !votes are on the first question only; they should be separated. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   Interesting; I agree with your assessment that this proposal covers only the two areas you mention. When you say "this structure", what exactly do you refer to? Do you oppose because the 'structure' contains things that you actively disagree with, of just because you believe it is not sufficiently complete? Happy‑melon 21:16, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   I actively disagree with any proposal to make sighted status another handout at will, a sub-admin status; it should be acquired automatically. Beyond that, this proposal should have added to it the conditions suggested by us opposers, which would increase the information generated and decrease its potential for actual harm. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:24, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   • I also oppose any system which means that logged in editors do not see what our readers see. WYSIWYG. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:13, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

   For the record, the median sighting time at the German Wikipedia is one week three weeks (still unacceptable), and it is taking some effort to keep it that low. Until this drastically changes, I take all assurances that FR is "working" there with several grains of salt. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:16, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   For the record, the median sighting time at the German Wikipedia is certainly much shorter than 1 week; the reason for Septentrionalis' misconception is explained at WT:FLAGGED#21 days?.PaddyLeahy (talk) 00:35, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

4. Oppose - for two reasons, at least. First, in this proposal 'bots are given more capability than registered users. That represents an underlying flaw in the thinking of those who propose this "solution." Second, the terminology invented by this proposal, specifically but not limited to "sighted" and "unsighted", has no commonly understood meaning in American English that maps well to the underlying implementation. (sdsds - talk) 19:07, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   I prefer to think of it in terms of how we populate the 'reviewer' user group. In an ideal world, we could independently review every user for editor status, and approve them individually. Unfortunately, we also have to get a substantial number of reviewers immediately or any FlaggedRevs implementation will inevitably fail. So we consider "which groups of editors can we promote en masse to reviewer status?" Essentially, where have we already judged a group of editors to be at least trustworthy enough to be reviewers? Admins are obvious candidates; we trust them with much more than mere sighting. Rollbackers ditto. As for bots, consider what we're really giving them. Bots are just scripts that repeatedly do actions that have community consensus, actions that would be too numerous for humans to do manually. As such, every action performed by a bot must meet the low standard to be considered 'sighted', as they must also meet the much higher standard of having community support. However, it would not be appropriate for bots to go around sighting edits made by other editors, which is why if you look closely bots are given the autoreview permission but not the review permission. So when a bot makes an edit on top of a sighted revision, that edit is automatically sighted - if we didn't do this then someone would have to run around behind all of our maintenance bots sighting their edits manually, which completely defeats the purpose of having a bot in the first place. But when a bot makes an edit on top of an unsighted revision, that set of edits is not sighted, as is quite appropriate since the underlying edit needs human review. Bots are already given access to permissions that are not available to registered users; why is giving them a few more somehow taboo? I'm not going to comment on your second point, although if you want to 'translate' the terms into ones that make more sense to you and other American editors, we'd be delighted to see such translations. Happy‑melon 19:22, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   So only admins and bots can actually change the visible form of test articles? I regret not being able to make my opposition stronger. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:39, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   I got that as saying admins, rollbackers, bots (autorev), and then most likely ACC. The other users could get approved individually if they wanted to be reviewers. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 22:05, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   Admins, rollbackers, bots in certain situations, and anyone else who asks for and receives the 'reviewer' user right. This proposal makes no statements about who may be elegible for the latter category; that's for us to decide, and decide very clearly, at a later date. I will eat my hat if the consensus on that is not "give 'reviewer' to anyone who asks for it unless there is an obvious reason not to". Happy‑melon 22:40, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   Then write it into the proposal. If Happy melon is right, it will draw no objections. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

5. Oppose. First, the proposal would enable a specific configuration of flagged revisions, but the proposal admits that it would not scale to wide deployment. Why even test a system like this? We should turn FRs on only to trial either a fully working system or a simplified version of that system. We should not trial FRs with a configuration that does not reflect how they would be used in practice. If there is no consensus for what a working system might look like, then there is no consensus for how to trial FRs! So the present proposal is premature.

   I realize that part of the reason for the proposal is to find a good configuration through experience. But that experience will be wasted if the trial configuration is not similar to the configuration we want to use on a wider scale. The experience we get with the wrong configuration could lead us to make the wrong decision: Either to use FRs when we should not, or to not use FRs when we should.

   Second, the proposal provides for no way to test whether this configuration is any good. Even if the proposal reflects current consensus for an FR implementation, it could be that the implementation will fail in practice. The only way to determine this is through testing, but the proposal does not provide any tests. Without any tests, how will we know whether the configuration works? The tests need to state which articles FR will be applied to, for how long, and how the tests will be ended when they are over. Without that, the proposal is incomplete.

   The present proposal says that it is designed to let us conduct multiple tests of FRs. Two possible tests are at Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Trial/Proposed trials. But turning on FRs and testing them are a package deal. Without tests, we cannot tell if the FR implementation is the right one; and if we are testing FRs, then we are trying to tell if our FR implementation is the right one. Leaving tests out ensures that we cannot tell whether FRs work or not.

   As a consequence of all of this, I oppose the proposal as it is written. Ozob (talk) 21:49, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   I'd argue that even if the proposal is technically very different from the final wide-scale implementation, as long as the user interface is similar it's still valuable as a mock-up for an experiment. A version of the final system would be ideal, but I think it's better to test something to motivate and direct future changes, so that we can begin iterating. Dcoetzee 22:10, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

6. Per This post. But it looks like I'm in the minority. If we do go with a trial, a gradual implementation should be rolled out (few thousand articles a week, tops.)NuclearWarfare ^{contact me}_{My work} 22:47, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

   Strike per Jerry (currently #38 in supports). Tis nothing but a tactical move. I'm sorry, but I wouldn't be terribly sad if this failed.

7. Oppose: For the reasons I explained here. - Rjd0060 (talk) 22:48, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
8. Oppose. Vague scope of the test (who picks the articles to be censored), vague review procedure (FAC level? NPP level?) etc. NVO (talk) 01:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   The proposal is deliberately vague deliberately does not consider such points, becuase we're not trying to decide on any particular details such as those at this point. Each trial will require a separate consensus on precisely the details you note. All we're doing here is saying "if we get that consensus, we want to have the technical ability to implement it". Happy‑melon 11:04, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   Why do you want a vote on a vague proposal????? What is that supposed to accomplish????? Ozob (talk) 20:54, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   I'll strike that; you're correct that vagueness would be extremely unhelpful. Rather, I'll say that the proposal "deliberately does not consider" some areas. The reason for this is, in all honesty, to break this hugely complicated process down into bite-size chunks that we can actually chew on. Right now we have "part 1" in its final stage: this poll. "Part 2" is still in a discussion stage; although it was not anticipated, I'm absolutely delighted that the high publicity of this poll is bringing in a very wide range of participants to that discussion, which I think is likely to come up with a much more balanced set of trials, not least because we have people involved who are looking for negative data as well as positive. I think that's a very healthy thing, but it's not something that would have happened if we had 'completed' that discussion as well and then rolled the two proposals into one before coming to the wider community. Yes, we'd only have had to have one community-wide poll, but reduced wider participation is not, IMO, a good thing. You've said somewhere else that you understand the impossibility of changing the subject of a poll while it's in progress; if you accept the necessity for a final poll to demonstrate consensus, then you understand the inevitable contradiction: every new person to such a wide discussion brings in new ideas many of which you'd dearly like to include, but at some point the metaphorical foot has to come down and you have to say "no, we need to consider one static version". In my opinion, being able to say "Ok, we've made these parts static and we want you to !vote on them, but we'd also very much like your contributions to the other parts which are still fluid while you're here..." is the best of both worlds. Do you disagree? Happy‑melon 10:58, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

   OK, good, that correction reads much better. I agree that it's good to break things in to small chunks. But I guess I don't see the overall picture. You and several other users brought forward this proposal with some larger plan in mind, and that plan still isn't entirely clear to me or, it seems, to a lot of other people. That plan may not be entirely clear to you, either, because you may not have worked it out yet. But without that sort of plan, how do we know where we'll go from here? How will we decide what tests to run? When will the tests happen? Where will their success or failure be discussed? Who will judge whether to continue running tests or to stop? And so on. Not knowing these things leads people to absurd fears about cabals. I'm sure you can detect a hint of paranoia in more than a couple of the "oppose" comments.

   Of course, I fall pretty heavily on the planning-in-advance side. (You can see evidence of this at the extremely long list Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Trial/Proposed_trials#Possible metrics to measure success of trials. I'm sure I'll think of more things to add, too...) I'm naturally inclined to doubt proposals that don't spell everything out, and unfortunately this proposal is one of those. Ozob (talk) 00:34, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

   If the trial calls for censoring access to one single article, no mater how stable, then the choice of this article must be clear and public. It's not. NVO (talk) 19:45, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   Indeed, becuase it hasn't been decided yet. There's no point in pouring hundreds of hours of time and energy into fighting our way to a consensus on that decision if there's no technical ability to implement it once we finally decide. I can promise you that that later proposal will be just as clear and public as this one. Happy‑melon 20:51, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

9. Oppose Wikipedia has always worked on a basis of trust, we have always said that being an admin is nothing special and most importantly its an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. Flagged revisions says you can edit but your edit cant be seen we dont trust you. It places importance on having tools creating an importance that shouldnt be there. The worse thing is flagged revisions makes the presumption that all edits are malicious and increases the power of POV pushers/Cabals to control article content. In all of this people appear to be loosing sight of the characteristics that made Wikipedia what it is. Gnangarra 01:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

   I agree with Gnangarra, when you treat people as equals then you get respect and dedication. The proposal represents old style thinking where 'experts' determine what is wrong and right. New style thinking says let the reader of the article decide what level of accuracy they want by selectable option. If such a capability were available then the present proposal would be unnecessary.--Wildplum69 (talk) 08:03, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

   Protected and semi-protected articles are already putting up barriers to people editing. With Flagged Revisions we could make it easier for people to edit problematic pages, without necessarily having to protect or semi-protect them. That could increase participation, not decrease it.—greenrd (talk) 10:04, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

10. Opppose I cannot support any move to technically implement Flagged Revisions for a series of trials until there are actual concrete proposals for how the specific trials will be undertaken, specifically, the articles to be included, the duration, the method of reviewer approval, and the specific data to be collected to show success/failure. The current set of four suggested trials all use the same duration and method of reviewer approval, so I could not support any of them as I don't agree with either a 2 month duration or an admin approval process. Additionaly, the proposed questions to be answered by the trials miss out a fundemental point, will Flagged Revisions increase the level of perceived beaurocracy to the point where potential contributors/contributions are lost? It is all very well tinkering at the edges by measuring backlogs or the changes in the amount of 'reader exposed' vandalism, but if you don't propose to measure the effect on one of the fundemental basic advantages of Wikipedia, then what's the point of the trials? I consider myself an experienced editor now, obviously with an account, but that all started from the gradual introduction to the site's ways from making sporadic IP edits. The up front complexity of Flagged Revisions looks to me at least to have massive potential to deter those intial good faith IP contributions which can then lead to better things. I want absolute assurance that these trials will be able to provide proof they will be a net benefit to the project in that respect. MickMacNee (talk) 01:47, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Expanding on my theme of what this proposal needs to commit to measuring, before it even gets to a stage of fine tuning trial details, here are some questions I think need adding to the proposal page Procedural implementation section:

    What effect, if any, does the Flagged Revisions nature of delayed visibility for edits made by constructive unregistered users have on their overall contribution history, and on the total and ratio of conversion of unregistered into registered users?

    What effect, if any, does the use of sighting to filter out basic errors have on the perceptions of the factual accuracy of unsourced or unreviewed but sighted articles?

    What effect, if any, does the selective protection of a sub-set of article types such as BLP's or disputed pages have on the wider perception of Wikipedia as an information source on all topics?

    What effect, if any, does the presence of Flagged Revisions have on the nature, volume and response time at the help desks and other advice/request forums?

    MickMacNee (talk) 07:47, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

11. Strongly Opppose. Unnecessarily complicated for no real good. 63.3.15.129 (talk) 02:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
12. Oppose Pace Black Kite, there is a good bit to lose—I don't imagine that I need set out that argument once more here—and very little to gain; I am utterly unpersuaded that the net effect on the project of the implementation of flagged revisions should be positive, and I cannot imagine that any trial experience should lead me to think otherwise, my opposition's resting on my firm rejection of flagged revisions as inconsistent with my understanding of how our enterprise (at least as regards the formulation of online content) ought to work. Joe 04:45, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    If you are so confident that a trial would not provide any evidence in favour of implementing FlaggedRevisions more widely, shouldn't you be supporting it? If all it does is show that FlaggedRevs is a Bad Idea^TM, it would strengthen your position, not weaken it. Happy‑melon 11:07, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    What is there to lose in a trial of the system? Black Kite 14:25, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    If the trials are not framed and measured objectively, quite a lot. MickMacNee (talk) 15:42, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    I found it amusing to read "objectively" and then merely "quite a lot" in the same sentence. --Waldir ^talk 19:43, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    It won't be so amusing if bad data leads us to a bad decision. Ozob (talk) 20:46, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

13. Oppose per WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY. This may appear to be worth a try, but it increases the "hierarchy of participation" to WP and decreases its ease of universal use at the same time as increasing Admin workload. Furthermore, I do not agree with that this will be the by any means the most effective way of protecting our BLPs, most of which are see no more than a couple of 'tweak edits' a year and many of which remain unsourced for long periods and are so either a high-risk category or no risk at all, depending how you look at it. Tagging doesn't deal with that problem. Having said that, I'm tempted to go tactical with NuclearWarfare, though. Ohconfucius (talk) 06:31, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    I would definitely encourage you to do so. I'm not yet convinced that this is "the solution" for BLPs myself. However, I want to see for myself rather than make blind guesses based on vague extracts from a foreign language wiki with a radically different culture. I really hope that this will actually decrease the strength of the apparent hierarchy, not increase it. WP:DEAL to the contrary, there are as you say significant jumps in perceived 'status', particularly between admins and non-admins. By creating an intermediate level, I think we can smooth out some of those gaps. There's nothing wrong with there being a hierarchy of respect and trust, as long as the hierarchy of technical tools is the same shape and size. Currently it's not, I agree that that is a problem; I think that this may be one step on the road to correcting that. Happy‑melon 11:15, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

14. Exceptionally Strong Oppose - We launched this on Wikinews, and it nearly lead to all out bloodshed, mutiny and resignations. I personally have been editing here for over 4 years, and quite frankly, I don't need someone else reviewing my damn work to make sure its correct before other people see it. If this gets implemented here, I WILL RESIGN. I've been doing this long enough to do the work without having a bloody overseer! Thor Malmjursson (talk) 07:44, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    May I ask you to provide evidence of bloodshed on Wikinews? In addition, you are a rollbacker now, and therefore you will automatically become a reviewer if FR are enabled. Then you will be able to sight others edits yourself, and moreover all your edits to sighted revisions will be sighted automatically. So I do not see any problem here. Ruslik (talk) 09:03, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    I didn't say it CAUSED bloodshed, I said it NEARLY caused bloodshed. And since I am not allowed by the rules of IRC to publish any logs from discussion on there, I cannot provide evidence of this situation. Rest assured however, that the discussion on WN's IRC channel almost lead to 3 of us, 2 who are accredited reporters (myself and one other) walking out on the project. The main reason was that initially, not everyone was going to be given editor status (reviewer). I only relented when this was reversed. I am however, still completely and fundamentally opposed to FR being implemented in ANY form, trial or otherwise. Since with Flagged Revs, you are not allowed to sight your own work, this potentially means everything I create as a new article having to be sighted by someone else. I am not accepting that in any way. I don't care if I get God Mode from this. If it happens, I'll shut the door on my way out :) Thor Malmjursson (talk) 09:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    The reason why edits of a reviewer to an article (whose last revision is not sighted) are not automatically sighted is that the unsighted revision may contain vandalism. In my opinion, the best solution is: if you are going to edit an article whose last revision is not sighted, you should simply check and sight this article yourself before making your edits! Then you can edit it, and all your edits will be sighted automatically. Again I do not see any problem. Ruslik (talk) 09:32, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    And again, you miss the point. My biggest beef is simple. If I create any New article, I cannot, by the terms of FR, sight it myself. It HAS to be done by someone else. I have been here long enough to know how to create an article and what kind of content to put in it without having to have someone else check up to make sure I did it right before it gets published. Now do you understand why I am pissed with this idea? Thor Malmjursson (talk) 09:40, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    That s the problem this is being done because an edit may contain vandalism, what percentage of all mainspace edits are actually vandalism? Gnangarra 09:36, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Ok, I understand you now. However currently there is no rules about the use of sight function on Wikipedia. They will be created in the future (if FR are enabled). So I am not against allowing creators of the articles (if they reviewers) to sight their own articles just after creation. The risk is low, because reviewers are trusted members of the community. Ruslik (talk) 09:48, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    In addition the proposed setup does not mean that the flagged revisions will be enabled over all articles including new ones. FR will be enabled just over a subset of highly visible articles. New articles will not need to be sighted unless FR are enabled over them manually. Ruslik (talk) 09:58, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Withdrawn from conversation - Please see my talk and user pages. They both say the same thing. I've quit WP. :) Thor Malmjursson (talk) 21:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    No, the proposal says nothing about which pages will be flagged and which pages won't be. Some of the proposed trials are specifically intended to catch some non-highly visible articles. Ozob (talk) 20:59, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    In fact the "rules of FR" don't require anything like this. There is nothing to technically prevent reviewers sighting their own work, be it new pages or edits to existing articles. On en.wiki I suspect that would be encouraged. The "rules" you rail against are the policies set up by en.wikinews, policies that I very much doubt will ever be enacted here. If such policies are ever enacted here, you'd be quite within your rights to walk out (I would probably join you). But don't assume that all FlaggedRevs implementations are equal; that's one thing we've learnt the hard way. Happy‑melon 11:03, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    English Wikinews or another one? I don't remember any near-bloodshed. --Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 13:15, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Indeed, if this user is talking about English Wikinews, they are out of their tree. The implementation of Flagged Revisions led to nothing more than a short lived heated discussion (as per normal, with any new policy). In addition, Flagged Revisions has lead to a significant increase in the quality of Wikinews articles, even though we have a very small group of dedicated editors (between 10 and 15 at any given time). So if you're going to use Wikinews as an example, at least go through the trouble to get it right:P. That said, there are valid reasons to oppose Flagged Revisions; Wikinews is a special case because of 1)Our small userbase, and 2)Our very very short article turnover time (news cannot be old, so complete articles that might take months on Wikipedia have to be put out in mere hours on Wikinews.) In my opinion these conditions do not exist on Wikipedia, rendering Flagged Revisions of limited value here. Gopher65_talk 17:02, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

15. Oppose Needlessly complex and a deterrent to new editor contributions that should not be accepted, especially given the preexisting tools available. That said, I think it somewhat inappropriate that this was even opened up for discussion prior to closure of the widely publicized strawpoll, and that notice of this discussion was so deeply buried in that conversation. Limiting visibility in this manner undoubtedly skews the results of this straw-poll in favor of the editors who were initially promoting the concept. MrZaius^talk 13:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
16. Oppose Completely unnecessary and needlessly complex. It makes a farce of "Anybody can edit" by creating groups of editors who by definition are the only ones who can edit freely without restrictions. We can just abolish WP:AGF for anon editors completely then, seeing that this proposal will assume they are making bad edits that need to be reviewed. So this creates much more work, new structures and more drama...and for what? I saw it on de-wiki, where I got that "sighter"-status - anyone can get it with a few edits and a bit of history, so we are just inviting vandals to become "reviewers" and then they can wreak havoc, seeing that most people will think reviewed versions are without problems. We got options to protect the content already which are not having such problems. Regards SoWhy 13:37, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    So you are proposing instead of making farce of "Anybody can edit" simply to abolish "Anybody can edit" principle and protect all sensitive articles? Ruslik (talk) 13:45, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    I think what he was getting at was that the current and usually temporary protections with clearly established editing procedures are already well understood and functional and don't require the creation of a new user class, needlessly complicating the already complex guidelines and editor-hierarchy of the wiki. That said, the automatic status mentioned in the parent post doesn't seem like a valid point to complain about, as it sounds an awful lot like the status required to edit a semiprotected article. MrZaius^talk 15:47, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    That is a simplistic comparison to say the least. By definition, SP'd articles are being watched by many people, more than enough to see and respond to {edit requests}. Blanket sighting of all articles, including the back-waters and niche topics which nobody is frequently watching, is a totally different prospect. MickMacNee (talk) 16:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Also, I am German, so I know the German implementation and it's problems. De-wiki has a backlog of 11,000 articles and they are using bots to do the job and anyone with 300 edits, 60 days and no blocks gets the flag automatically there. A trial might work for a few selected articles but once this were to be implemented for all articles, I dread to think how long the backlog will be. New-page patrolling has a huge backlog, as many already pointed out, but that backlog does not prevent huge groups of editors from making changes to live articles. Once all the impression of "shiny new feature" is gone, people will not do the massive work this proposal will undoubtedly create. SoWhy 20:07, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    So it might work for smaller sets of articles, and might not work for larger sets? That's definitely something I want hard data on. And if that is the case, then what's stopping us from only using FlaggedRevs on such smaller sets. Nowhere is it written in stone that FlaggedRevs has to be enabled over all articles or not at all; this trial configuration is proof of that. Happy‑melon 21:06, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    No, the point is that it creates a huge workload that will not be cared for. It might work for a week, a month, but someday people will be bored by their shiny new toy and then even limited sets will not be cared for. We got dozens of areas with huge backlogs already - no need to create another system that will create backlogs. And the lesson from the example I cited is that when such backlogs occur on a wiki where practically most regular accounts are allowed to flag and there are bots to flag as well, we can guarantee that this will happen here as well - on a much larger scale. SoWhy 23:59, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Your comparison to the German Wiki makes No Effort to assess what they are doing wrong. Articles such as Evolution have very fast turn around, and the current protections saves them time (and stress) as less vandalism goes live. However, the current situation does allow easy circumnavigation of Protections. Furthermore, I feel Wiki-veterans basically forget that any Protection of an article is far more disruptive to a Wiki than a flagged version system used in its place. Again, for a small set of articles, that are heavily trafficked, vandalized and consequently watched by active patrollers & admins. A backlog simply will not form given those realities. When a backlog does occur on articles that have become under supervised over time, then a bot automatically nominates it to be unflagged. - RoyBoy 05:40, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

    Protection works fine as is: in moderation. While it's as unwiki as we get and FlaggedRevs would be preferable to protection, the argument was made on the a different basis—a counter-argument based on use of FlaggedRevs to replace protection is fallacious. {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 07:29, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

    Protection cannot be replaced by flaggedrevs, to think so is a logical fallacy. Protection is (or should be) used seldom just because it is anti-wiki. As one of the admins handling RFPP I deal with protection requests all the time and I know how people think otherwise, but that does not make it any more correct. But protection does not single out a certain group of editors as "better" - it is plain simple "Sorry, we cannot handle the vandalism at the moment but usually you should be able to edit this article without anyone judging your edits for worthyness". FlaggedRevs are "Sorry, we assume your edits are vandalism, so our we-don't-want-to-call-them-elite-editors™ will check if your contributions are okay - come back in 2-3 weeks to see if they were accepted". If one compares those two concepts, I think the latter is much more anti-wiki as it effectively does not get rid of editing rights but of WP:AGF. Also, RoyBoy's argument is incorrect - if we need bots to flag such articles, then we have a backlog and we have more work (more serverload by multiple bots, some people have to write and maintain them etc.) And if those articles are watched by active patrollers and admins, they can revert those vandalism edits anyway. So there is no reason for flaggedrevs in these cases and in no others. Regards SoWhy 17:36, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

    While you are citing valid concerns, the 2-3 week turnaround guesstimate completely ignores what I said about implementing FlaggedRevs on heavily edited articles. Turnaround would be closer to 2-3 hours, not weeks. If it were weeks, then indeed I would be opposed to the idea as well. Also you fail to carry forward your point, logically speaking, we use Protection on articles where WP:AGF for new editors has proven ill-advised. Hence, the drastic measure in the first place. - RoyBoy 06:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

    Additionally, if FlaggedRevs was indeed used only in specific cases of heavy vandalism (which are currently protected), the number of articles involved would be laughably small. I repeat, the en.wiki has more regular editors than any other; watching plenty of articles, making backlogs a minority issue. Bot overhead is simply not a valid objection. - RoyBoy 06:17, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

17. Oppose I just don't like it. The result of a trial is very likely get misrepresented or taken to show something it doesn't. Maybe if we had a specific trial proposal to consider I would change my mind. --Apoc2400 (talk) 13:47, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
18. Oppose "Anyone can edit" ? Anyone can, as long as your edit gets subsequent approval. This will double the workload of editors. GreyWyvern (talk) 14:49, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Why are you so sure? Currently all new changes and newly created articles are patrolled. Patrollers mark edits as patrolled or revert them. Flagged revisions will simply replace patrolling. You can think about FR as patrolling "on steroids". This analogy can help you to understand what FR really mean. Ruslik (talk) 15:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    The advantage of replacing patrolling with sighting is a philosopical issue, as well as a technical issue. If nobody patrols a good contribution, then no harm is done by default. If nobody sights a good contribution, harm is done by default. If nobody patrols a bad edit, harm could be done, if nobody sights a bad edit, no harm is done by default. It is very much AGF vs. ABF. MickMacNee (talk) 15:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Insightful comment :) however, I'd say that in the case of a good contribution not being sighted, "harm is done by default" should perhaps be replaced by "no good is done by default", which is different. --Waldir ^talk 19:55, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    I tried to represent this visually. Check out File:Patrolling vs sighting.png --Waldir ^talk 20:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

19. Oppose: We won't even require people to register an account (which still makes it the encyclopedia anyone can edit), no reason to do this, which actually restricts things much more than requiring account registration, which takes all of 8 seconds.--IvoShandor (talk) 15:09, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
20. Oppose: There are some articles I've worked on that haven't had another editor - muchless an administrator - pass by them in three or four years -- I can't imagine the frustration of someone trying to update information in them and having to wait indefinitely to see if their changes are even accepted, before being bold and adding further changes. I also see a "refusal to flag" becoming a new form of edit war between our less-than-noble administrators - all in all, it's a poorly-conceived plan. Sherurcij ^{(speaker for the dead)} 15:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    How about our rollbackers and the 5,000 or so editors who will ask for and receive the 'reviewer' flag? If you can't find anyone in 10,000 sighters who is willing to flag a revision, it must be very controversial indeed. I jest, but the point is that the designers of this extension have given a lot of thought to problems exactly like the ones you mention: there are several new special pages to collect articles such as you describe so that new edits are sighted in a reasonable time. Happy‑melon 21:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Having seen FR implemented at en.WN where I'm an accredited reporter/reviewer/etc - no, "new edits" are not "sighted in a reasonable time" -- and there's a much higher admin/text ratio on WN...exponentially so. We have approximately 300 texts editable at any given time...and nearly as many reviewers...and it can still take six hours to remove incorrect information from a front-page "news" story. Flagged revisions simply don't work, German Wikipedia seems to suggest the same. Sherurcij ^{(speaker for the dead)} 07:22, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

21. VERY Strongly oppose I agree with SoWhy and GreyWyvern above - This would make a complete farce of the "Anyone can edit" principle which is at the core of Wikipedia, and introduce the possibility that completely valid and accurate edits may be blocked simply because the person responsible for approving the edit is unaware of the information (for example, the information is in a printed publication or TV broadcast only available in one country, and the person responsible for reviewing the edit is in a different country and has no access to this source), or because it differs from their own personal opinion. The only way this could be avoided is if all edits are reviewed by multiple persons located in different parts of the world, and passed if they receive a majority vote from the reviewers - and we know that will never happen. And who is going to appoint the reviewers? What will the criteria for becoming a reviewer be? How can we be sure they are truly impartial and have sufficient knowledge of the subject to be able to accurately assess the validity of each edit? Wikipedia already has far too many self-appointed "experts" who delete any edits they feel do not match their own personal views - Can you imagine the chaos this could bring if they had the validity of being one of the official subject reviewers??? For this reason, I believe this is a VERY bad idea, which will drive away a significant number of existing editors, and also scare away potential new ones. I myself would have to think long and hard about my continued participation here if such a scheme was introduced, and would very probably leave for pastures new. Emma white20 (talk) 15:41, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    You seem to misunderstand the proposal. Reviewers are not supposed to check the validity of edits. They are only supposed to look for obvious vandalism, libel and copyright violations. Therefore any revision that does not contain the above mentioned statements must be sighted. Ruslik (talk) 16:47, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Not "must" but "should". There is no obligation on any reviewer to sight anything. Nobody can be punished for not sighting a page, whatever its contents. MickMacNee (talk) 17:00, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    And I thank you. This has persuaded me; the only constraint on the obvious possibility of abuse here is that reviewers should not do it. So they should not; as editors should not revert war, and admins should not employ their tools in content disputes. Has that stopped them? No. So here. Flagged revisions should never be tolerated; it should be stopped now and here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:43, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

22. Oppose: This is a really bad idea. It will deter new editors, since the intial appeal of contributing to the encyclopedia "anyone can edit" is being able to see your changes online immediately. Would anyone bother if their edit amounted to no more than a saved preview? I doubt it. Richard75 (talk) 15:42, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
23. Strongest possible oppose although I'm in the minority here. As Richard above, this will deter people from the idea this is an encyclopaedia which anyone can edit. Not only that, but it's one we should be able to edit when we want and without having every edit checked by 'higher-up' users. This idea promotes the idea that we value our members over IPs, which I don't believe in at all. IPs contribute highly to this encyclopaedia despite others vandalising it. Therefore, I cannot support a trial of this system. —Cyclonenim (talk · contribs · email) 15:52, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
24. Oppose for pretty much all the reasons above. We don't need this kind of German bureaucracy.The Magnificent Clean-keeper (talk) 15:57, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
25. Absolutely, positively, hell no. Flagged revisions are a bad idea on so many levels, and against the open wiki spirit. So oppose. SchuminWeb (Talk) 15:58, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Comment. Wikipedia is part of the larger free culture landscape, akin to GNU/Linux in promoting open standards, free knowledge, and widespread participation in our cultural future. Now let me ask you this. In Linux kernel development, does every contribution of code automatically upload and install to every Linux user's computer? Because that's how I see Wikipedia in its current state.

    Revision control and versioning are not limiters of freedom or creativity. They merely seperate workshop from distribution center, providing the end-user with a polished product while leaving the workshop -- saw-dust filled and chaotic -- in another room. In the workshop, the "wiki spirit" can pulse stronger than ever, because contributors need not feel afraid when "being bold" and making ambitious changes to an article. The implementation of versioning with "stable" and "unstable" branches does not undermine openness or the wiki spirit. It just moves the inevitable mistakes and mishaps in the development process out of the realm where they can do real damage. Estemi (talk) 16:48, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    A good analogy. But we have to be clear about what we are defining as "damage". Linux certainly takes no responsibility for defective code if they release it, but they did not decide to have a QA system instead of automatic uploading. The perception of damage can take many forms on Wikipedia, where the automatic availability of open content is a prime mission. Is a sighted article free of obvious vandalism but still unreferenced or subtlely POV any more damaging? Is a libelous statement about a BLP any more damaging than straight lies and misinformation about, say, a product? Wikipedia is now seen as a timely source of unfolding information (whether we want it to be or not), is the discouraging of that type of contribution more or less damaging? I can't count the number of times I have ended up expanding articles based on a single unreferenced but timely line added by an IP. Will that source of inspiration to the "workshop" from unregistered users dry up with the up front comlexity or time delayed updating of Flagged Revisions? And I am not entirely sure even that restricting the viewing of libelous content to registered users only makes any difference from a legal damage point of view (I have requested information at the main page here). I am all for a trial of Flagged Revisions if it is to try and measure it merits against these basic issues, I am not for it if it is merely here to make the lives of the "workers" easier. MickMacNee (talk) 17:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    I disagree that the analogy is a good one. Computer software is very fragile. Changing a single line of code in a tiny way can turn a working program into a pile of scrap. (What happens if you change an increment to a decrement, or start searching an array from the first element instead of the zeroth?) An encyclopedia is not so fragile. We humans are used to dealing with incomplete or sketchy information. We do it all the time when we communicate: All the words that everyone's ever written are an attempt to communicate our thoughts and feelings, but you can see misunderstandings and clarifications everywhere. A tiny mistake in an encyclopedia makes it less useful, but it does not make it useless.

    So it becomes a matter of balancing: We need to determine what level of error we're willing to tolerate as a price for the content our editors contribute. We could take the Citizendium or Veropedia routes, which are both much more extreme than FRs; we could return to the old days when IPs were allowed to create new pages; or we can try to balance them. I feel like FRs will discourage good editing by IPs. Consequently they may never get accounts and may never become regular editors. I edited as an IP for a long time before getting an account. I'd never have an account here otherwise.

    However, none of that is relevant to my own objections to the current proposal. The only way to get good data is to do a well-planned, carefully considered test. Happy-melon called his own proposal "deliberately vague", and I find that intolerable. Ozob (talk) 21:18, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Please don't call it "my" proposal just because I happen to be the most active on this thread, although I can see how such a misunderstanding would arise. This is the combined work of half a dozen editors, with contributions from a dozen more. That said, I agree that proceeding from here to think "ok now we have everything we need to do a trial" would be a farcical disaster. It's probably best to consider this proposal "part 1 of 3". Happy‑melon 10:34, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    I also like your analogy Estemi. The wiki spirit will remain and we will spend less time cleaning up vandalism. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 04:45, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

26. Strong Oppose: I really don't see the advantage to the idea of flagged revisions. I agree with the above commenters; this will make a farce of the slogan "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit." By restricting free editing to only an elite group it is unfairly subjugating everyone else, creating more work for that elite group and reducing the ease with which all other editors can edit the encyclopedia. Why should rollbackers, administrators, and bots get to say that they don't trust editors who are established users and not vandals, or IP users who are making good edits? It doesn't make sense to me, and as far as I can tell protecting pages and undoing vandalism seems to be working well enough without most edits being reviewed by this elite group in the manner enumerated in this proposal. I don't like it, because it's a terrible idea that will discourage new editors from contributing to Wikipedia and furthermore the whole concept goes against Wikipedia's principles. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 16:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
27. Strong Oppose per those above me. Is this the end of wikipedia? Wizardman 16:26, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
28. Oppose. Timeline: Proposal to implement Flagged Revisions. Two weeks later: Proposal to rename project to "Citizendium". Bleeech. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 16:46, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
29. Oppose - Wikipedia should be all-live, all the time. Flagged revisions are against the main point here. —La Pianista ^(T•C) 16:56, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
30. Oppose - against the wiki spirit of "anyone can edit" and will eventually create a massive backlog, like NPP has already. Sceptre ^(talk) 16:59, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    Why are you so sure that this quite a limited proposal will create (or worsen) backlogs? Ruslik (talk) 17:35, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

    The backlog on the German Wikipedia is three weeks. Ozob (talk) 21:23, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

31. Oppose, strongly. Come on, we're the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. –Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 17:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
32. Oppose. FlaggedRevs undermine the most basic principle of Wikipedia's success, which is that random people decide to click "edit" for the first time & get the instant satisfaction of seeing their contribution to knowledge displayed and disseminated to the entire world. Wareh (talk) 17:43, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
33. Oppose While I truly appreciate and respect the work that has gone into this proposal and the technology underlying it, particularly the patience shown in continually explaining things and answering questions and concerns, I believe this idea is fundamentally at odds with one of our core principles that allows anyone to edit articles. I am not in principle opposed to experimentation of this technology but I see no possible outcome that would convince me to support a full implementation and thus a trial would be largely a waste of valuable time and energy. --ElKevbo (talk) 17:50, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
34. Oppose Too antiwiki, it goes against our slogan: "The free encyclopedia that everyone can edit". If we use this system, I'm sure that the work made on anti-vandalism tools will be in vain. —_macy^{es: bot} 18:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
35. Oppose We already have backlogs with a similar feature for new pages this will just make these much much worse Alexfusco⁵ 18:16, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
36. Absolutely, positively NO. Since this feature is not compatible with any of the stated goals or purposes of wikipedia, and would create yet another way for a select group of people to force themselves on other editors and viewers, anything that works towards any possible implementation of this is unacceptable. Bushytails (talk) 18:34, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
37. Oppose but without prejudice. In previous discussion, someone from German Wikipedia had come here and told us how this feature leads to ownership-like attitudes. They just trash the revision if they don't like it. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:43, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
38. Strong oppose. for the reasons I have repeated several times (see Wikipedia talk:Flagged revisions). Admiral Norton ^(talk) 18:58, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
39. Oppose. I'd rather not become anti-Wiki. DiverseMentality 19:31, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
40. Oppose - I don't see how there's going to be enough people running around flagging revisions to keep all of the hundreds of thousands of less popular pages from going stale. For those pages, this is the same effect as banning ip editing, as no flagged user will ever come by and permit their changes. --PresN 20:05, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
41. Strong oppose. WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY, Semi-protecting certain (groups of) articles would be a lot better. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexanderpas (talk • contribs) 20:20, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
42. oppose As with all flagging proposals to much risk of articles getting locked as flaggers forget about them or lack the rescources to keep up.Geni 20:38, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
43. Strong Oppose - Once I thought about it, I almost vomited. This has got to be... .the most... useless, horrible idea we've come up with yet. I think this is a bad idea. Having the concept of review an article just to get the changes visible... just horrible. Imagine waiting weeks just for a typo change to be visible. This would cause backlog explosion, as well. We have over 2,000,000 articles, think of the backlog explosion. We simply don't have enough manpower and resources to deal with this... and that is why I must oppose this concept, trial, idea, in any shape or form... VX!^~~~ 20:52, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
44. Strong Oppose (i) could discourage editing by the more nervous, (ii) requires a lot of meta-work (ie not actually writing articles) when there is so much of that already and backlogs on many many lists and (iii) Most articles that anyone would be willing to review are already watched by interested editors and many many more are patrolled and thus there is already a perfectly good peer-review process in place. Please let's not make things more complicated. Babakathy (talk) 21:00, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
45. Strong oppose - Imagine the backlogs, at Newpages there is a huge backlog, and that is a heck of a lot smaller size than the whole of the wiki, it'll take about a year to get an edit approved. Plus there will simply never be enough manpower to keep up with it. This will take away the whole point of editing wikipedia, having immediate reliable information. Sunderland06 (talk) 21:03, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
46. Oppose. "You can edit this page right now [and view it published]" should continue to be a basic principle of this encyclopedia, no matter if you are an admin or an IP. --Anna Lincoln (talk) 21:05, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
47. Strong Oppose I think that there are far too many problems with flagged versions. (backlog, having a wikipedia approved version, the version you edit is different to that on the screen etc.) Martin451 (talk) 21:14, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
48. Strong Oppose Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Or so they say. BigDunc^Talk 21:28, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
49. Oppose because I don't want Wikipedia to lose its special quality that convinced me to become a member. Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit John Sloan (view / chat) 22:01, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
50. Oh dear god. Very Strong Oppose Oh dear god, think of the MASSIVE backlog that would ensue. The people that review the edits would never get any sleep! It's total blasphemy to think of implementing such a thing. I oppose this move very strongly. Until It Sleeps 22:09, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
51. Strong Oppose I strongly oppose any action which would turn editing Wikipedia in to a system whereby changes must be approved before they appear, rather than reviewed after they are added. The fun and effectiveness of immediate editing is what has made Wikipedia a successful encyclopedia to date. Flagged revisions is a flawed technical addition that fails to retain the appearance and spirit of open editing that Wikipedia relies upon to attract new volunteers. Open editing means "you can edit this page right now", not "you can edit this page and wait for your change to be approved". Jimbo himself once said that "you can edit this page right now must be a guiding check on everything that we do." Semi-protecting a tiny minority of pages, which is an up-front and honest way of saying "we can't handle the vandalism, please be patient", is far more preferable to a system that says "you can edit this page, but it won't really show up until we approve it". Flagged revisions will solve neither vandalism nor the problem of articles being taken seriously as a source (academically speaking). What's more, this adds a huge new workload. The current backlog on the German Wikipedia for sighting revisions is three weeks. That is an intolerable new burden for very little gain. If we are to add a new special userrights group, a new form of bureaucracy, then it must be for an absolutely vital reason. Flagged revisions is not vital. It's a shiny new toy that mucks with the founding pillars of this project. If anyone thinks that this is going to be received like some think (as an opening, rather than a closing, of the wiki) just look at The New York Times coverage of Flagged revisions: "the online encyclopedia anyone can edit would add a layer of hierarchy and eliminate some of the spontaneity." I for one will not stand for added hierarchy and the death of spontaneity. I hope you won't either. Steven Walling (talk) 22:24, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
52. Strong strong strong strong strong oppose Per the above reasons and because I like simplicity. Mww113 (talk) 22:38, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
53. Strong oppose - I have the sinking suspicion this will kill efforts at assuming good faith, and that this is being implemented because we think we've lost the will to assume. Xavexgoem (talk) 22:44, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
54. Extremely Strong Oppose. This would be extremely anti-wiki, and it would be a violation of WP:AGF. Also it would discourage people from editing, and it would ultimately kill the project. Also, what would we do about users who create pages? I might consider leaving if flagged revs are implemented. Jonathan321 (talk) 23:01, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
55. Oppose per MickMacNee, if there are to be any trials. —Mirlen^Talk 23:11, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
56. Oppose - Too many issues I don't like the prospect of at this time. VegaDark (talk) 23:23, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
57. Seems like a lot of extra work and does this not go against the real time nature of the wiki and the slogan that "anyone can edit"? –thedemonhog talk • edits 23:24, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
58. Oppose (strong): It made the German Wikipedia a toy for a minority of users who watch over other people's contributions. No trial needed for this ugly thing. --Cyfal (talk) 23:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
59. Oppose: I just can't see it working, and if it did there would be a small numbers of contributors leading to more elitism and bureaucracy. Most likely, it would just make a newpage style backlog. Enough with the user flags... If adminship is no big deal, all these flags need not exist. Ian¹³/t 23:32, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
60. Strongly oppose - if it takes away the ability to immediately implement changes, it destroys the point of Wikipedia. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 23:55, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
61. Strong oppose - Completely against the ethos, extra workload all over the place when people could be doing more valuable things, largely a net negative. — neuro^(talk) 00:11, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
62. No thanks. PeterSymonds (talk) 01:26, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
63. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." ✼ American Eagle (talk) 01:42, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
64. STRONG oppose This would go completly against the spirit of Wikipedia. Wikipedia may not be a Democracy but it isn't Communism either. People outside the ruling party should be able to make their edits just as fairly as people from within the system. Themfromspace (talk) 02:24, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
65. Oppose - I only supported the idea before when it was in regards to BLP. However, there is no limiting measure to it now. Thus, I feel as if this will be used in areas that will only cause a harm instead of the original benefit that it was originally proposed to bring. Ottava Rima (talk) 02:32, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
66. Oppose - Keeping to the Unix philosophy, simplicity is best. We have articles, we lock them (to various degrees) if they're prone to vandalism. It shouldn't get much deeper than that. --♥pashtun ismailiyya 04:08, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
67. Oppose - This adds too much complicated structure to the existing "editing-way-of-life." I have serious doubts that Flagging will accomplish anything except confusion, especially among new users. Acps110 (talk) 05:16, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
68. Weak Oppose- I've played around with the labs implementation. If you're a reviewer (which we'll presumably need A LOT of) this is nearly invisible, your changes are auto-approved. If you are a new editor, it just adds a new layer of bureaucracy and confusionto an already dizzying array of rules, conventions and ways of doing things. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit (pending review by insiders) doesn't have the same inspirational ring. I feel like I don't even know what problem this is solving anymore. Why are we making it harder for new editors to join the project? Lot 49a^talk 05:38, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    Also time median 1 week, some as long as 21 days? guys, that's insane! Lot 49a^talk 05:51, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    This is misunderstanding. From the same German report the median time articles edited by non-sighters wait is unfortunately currently not recorded, but if of course lower - most edits are checked be RC patrol, watchlists or wikiprojects/portals within minutes to hours'. So the majority of edits are sighted within minutes or hours, not days. 1 week and 21 days only refer to the average waiting time of edits that are in the list of unsighted pages (only minority of edits end up in it). Ruslik (talk) 08:49, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    OK now I'm totally confused. What causes an article to end up on this list with a median wait time of 1 week / as long as 21 days? They say the backlog is 12,000 articles. That seems like a substantial backlog. You are suggesting that most articles are approved quickly but then for those that aren't the median wait time is 1 week? Lot 49a^talk 20:35, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

69. Oppose- let's not make Wikipedia even more bureauocratic, unfriendly and bewildering. Reyk _YO! 05:48, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
70. Oppose per my discussion on one of the archives -- penubag  (talk) 07:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
71. Oppose Questions about the delays and workload in the approval process would not be answered by a small scale test. Would signicantly impact the type of collaborative editing that went into articles such as 2008 Mumbai attacks. Edgepedia (talk) 08:04, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    Further thought - today, if I type "XYZ is a thief" into a BLP it is likely to be reverted and I'll get a warning. However, if I type "When 19, XYZ stole a wallet from a friend and then spent three months in prison".<ref> XYZ Autobiography, published last year</ref> it is likely to be left. If we have sighting over a large number of articles, the first (if obvious vandlism) will not be accepted, but the second (probably) will. I don't think this gains us anything, apart from a false sense of security. Edgepedia (talk) 11:05, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

72. Oppose as violating the fundamental spirit of Wikipedia. --Cybercobra (talk) 09:24, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
73. Oppose as complicated, confusing, and frustrating. Far easier to ask IPs to register. -- Evertype·✆ 10:20, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
74. Oppose as it will break the wiki model by creating hierarchy among users. I would much rather see a system that allows "Veracity" scores to be assigned to each statement within an article. The user would then have the option of turning on a mode, which allows the veracity of each word/sentence/section/whatever within an article to be visualised. Perhaps colour or shade each word (or whatever) to indicate its veracity? In this way the reader can be continually informed of the veracity of what they read and judge whether to trust it. Some system (eg. mouse hover) needs to be provided whereby a reader can determine how the score for what they are reading has been derived (similar to an expert system traceback) and sources indicated. Veracity scores could be derived automatically, manually or in a hybrid manner. If each statement was linked to a citation a score could be automatically calculated based on a trustworthiness score for the source (based on some sort of "web of trust" type system between journals?). Alternatively editors could manually fact check and sway the veracity. More corroboration from more people increases veracity. Authors should not be able to influence the veracity score of what they have written. Maybe a hybrid whereby auto scoring is also influenced by humans? Whatever scoring system is used it is important that high veracity requires multiple verifications and it would be ideal if some "web of expertise/trust" style system could be used to objectively rate who are the true experts and assign their word a greater weight when calculating veracity within their field of expertise. Being provably a true expert in the field should be the only criteria by which one persons word should be given more weight than another. Even there, the expert should only have an advantage in scoring, not authoring. Being a member of some wikipedia admin class, having lots of edits, having a high profile, or whatever, should not be a criteria. Granted such a scheme is more difficult to implement than simple flagging, but I think it would be doable. No doubt the method used to derive veracity scores needs a lot more thought to be useable and to reflect more closely what most people judge to be the criteria for reliability. John Dalton (talk) 10:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
75. Storng Oppose I'm generally against restricting Wikipedia anymore. Guy0307 (talk) 10:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    Strongly Oppose No thanks, I've heard from admins that they'll be retiring if this is implemented, do we really need more admin resignations? The Helpful One 11:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    Comment I agree with you, Thehelpfulone. We definitely do not need anymore admins retiring for sure. I'm serious, that would make the problems associated with this substantially increase in magnitude due to less people here to help out the wiki, possibly causing a snowballing increase in problems. UntilItSleeps PublicPC 20:45, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

    I'm going to go Neutral now because I realise that a) This is just a vote to get the software installed and b) We need it installed to show how horrible it will be! The Helpful One 17:12, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

    Strong Weak oppose- I hate everything about this. More discouragement to new users, more bureucracy, more rules, more technical bullshit I'm not going to understand a word of, and the very thought of getting closer to voting to rate articles (ala YouTube) makes me sick. J Milburn (talk) 11:46, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

76. Oppose - As far as I can see flagged revisions has an awful lot of problems associated with it for very little gain. The obvious vandalism, etc that will be spotted by sighting would be exactly the sort of changes that would be picked up quickly and reverted in the normal sceme of things - and there will be a lot less people to spot and revert the changes - only "trusted" reviewers rather than everybody passing. It will not help to fix anything more subtle or insidious, and by adding long delays, will actually mean that harmful edits are more likely to get through. I also see big problems about edit conflicts with some people working on the live version and others working on the sighted version.Nigel Ish (talk) 11:54, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

    Note that it is always the latest version that is edited, there is no 'divergence' problems. Cenarium (Talk) 00:22, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

77. Strong oppose. Given the small number of editors who will be able to review articles, and the amount of content and volumes on Wikipedia, the implementation of this is unworkable, and can only possibly result in the articles which are displayed to the public becoming seriously out of date due to the backlog of articles to be flagged. All this to eliminate a small amount of obvious vandalism, which would probably be reverted fairly quickly anyway. This system is likely to be far less effective at preventing vandalism than the current system of simply reverting it, as the reviewers will be overstretched, and will not have time to conduct a detailed review of every article. Also, look at the damage that compulsory reviewing, albeit in a more stringent manner, did to Wikinews. --GW… 12:06, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
78. Strong oppose - "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", etc. etc. Ferronier (talk) 13:23, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
79. Oppose - the system is already used in the German-language wikipedia, and it just complicates things unnecessarily, is impractical and will keep newcomers from editing, thus limiting the degree by which new good editors emerge.Madcynic (talk) 13:45, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
80. Strong Oppose I understand the way of the world, asking for a trial means that something is given a permanent confirmation once the trial is done (if the trial works right - which it probably will). This is not isolated to Wikipedia but it's human nature. I opposed to the idea because I think it will take too much time away from the people we need to be working on articles, for I think it will scale poorly. I see BLP problems for only 2% of articles - 1% are the most important articles like George W. Bush and 1% are articles where someone has a chip on their shoulder against this person like Wayne Taylor. These articles need to be semi or fully protected. How come we now can't WP:AGF that anons might be doing some good? I hate how it discourages new editors - their edits won't appear online until someone approves them. If this passes, should I as an administrator now have to assess all the editors that I know on here to determine if they should be approved to sight articles? How unfair is that to me to pick some and fail others? If this passes, we need to remove the line "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." off the main page because I don't believe that it would be true any more. Royalbroil 14:27, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
81. Will create a massive backlog out of thin air for no good reason -- Gurch (talk) 14:44, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
82. Oppose. The scale of the proposed test is unnecessarily large, and the duration unnecessarily long. A much smaller group of articles could constitute a valid random sample without the risk of adding confusion, complexity, and contention across such a wide swath of article space. I remain skeptical about the idea of flagged revisions in the abstract, but if the proposal were for, say, stubs starting with 'Y', with all flagging turned off in 14 days, I'd support the test. Rivertorch (talk) 15:40, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
83. Very Strongly Oppose. This idea is just added bureaucracy to a process of editing that works well already, and with all the suggestions for how the 'reviewer' permissions would work, along with all of the exceptions and additions, seems overly-complicated for new users, and just a power-trip for those granted additional permissions and responsibilities. The idea goes against the principles of the encyclopedia, and would, even as a trial, be harmful to its progress. - RD ^(Talk) 15:48, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
84. Oppose per many of the reasons given above. The objections expressed by Gnangarra at no.9 reflect mine completely. sassf (talk) 16:39, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
85. Strong oppose – complete bureaucracy that will damage editor's free will to edit. Whilst the sentiment of the support is all well and good, we must accept that this will not be used in the interests of the article, instead creating divides out of thin air. We already have a report in the Signpost about the number of editors shrinking over the past few months, here is a perfect example why. Caulde 16:53, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
86. opppose. It's a Bad Idea. The Germans have tried it, and it's crap. Just more red tape, more self-styled "reviewers", yet another article grading system. Another bureaucracy will grow around it, just like GA, which was a good idea as originally intended, but which is a horrible thing as implemented today. This is just another power trip for our apparatchik population, and will not help improving Wikipedia. Today, you get your semi-trusted but timely and priceless info from 2.6 million untrusted Wikipedia articles, tomorrow you'll get it from 2.6 million untrusted and unreviewed Wikipedia articles? Where's the progress in that. We already have FA, for god's sake, that's the only mark of quality we need. Anything else is offered on a "take it or leave it" basis, with readers expected to use their brains when absorbing information. I encourage my students to use Wikipedia precisely because it is untrusted, and will thus teach them to use your sources responsibly. Another layer of bureaucracy will not help the reader, but it will harm the community and the project. --dab (&#55304;&#56435;) 19:15, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
87. Strong oppose as, whilst this extension may be useful on a heavily-moderated subscription (i.e. paid-for) service, it appears to be contrary to the spirit of wikipedia. --GrahamSmith (TALK) 19:34, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
88. Oppose While the principle is a good idea for BLPs, I'm not sure if this is a good idea Wikipedia-wide. Plus, Dbachmann brings up a good point--the German Wikipedia is only a third the size of this one, and it didn't work there. If this had been proposed solely for BLPs, it would be easier for me to support. Blueboy96 19:56, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
89. Oppose. Anyone can edit is the goose that laid the golden egg that is Wikipedia. I accept this is just about trials, which is more akin to an colonoscopy for the poor goose than just killing it, but why try something that is su utterly a) against the Wikipedia ethos and b) so wretchedly complicated? Sabine's Sunbird talk 22:00, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
90. Oppose - This will just scare away any new editor. It just doesn't fly for me. Ronhjones (talk) 22:16, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
91. Oppose - Goes against the very nature and character of Wikipedia. Trust, trust, trust! And keep it simple. Iterator12n ^Talk 23:00, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
92. Oppose. Keep it free to edit. Malinaccier (talk) 23:15, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
93. Oppose - anyone can edit. keep it simple. And who gets hurt by edits that get reverted (and quite quickly more often than not!)? xschm (talk) 01:41, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

    Who gets hurt? Well, Taner Akçam, for one. -- Frothy Sloth (talk) 03:37, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

    That piece of vandalism was done by a named account, now blocked. Most variants of these proposals would have permitted him to become a reviewer without much trouble; the rest have too few reviewers to be workable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:14, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

    I would change my !vote to support if it was explicitly stated that this proposal would be the one. As it stands it is too vague to support in a general sense. xschm (talk) 23:49, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

94. Oppose - Wikipedia works best when editors work together in a collaborative process to achieve consensus. This proposal does not seem to be imbued with that spirit. Dlabtot (talk) 01:52, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
95. Oppose: Boo, boring, part of the appeal/draw of Wikipedia is seeing your first edit just "pop up"! Enough of us cover the vandalism, and doing this thing wont change wikipedia's "it's full of nonsense" reputation (as obviously those who think that never use it), but it will alienate all the first time editors. Ryan4314 (talk) 02:05, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
96. Oppose. The proposed trial does not appear to address the main problem of flagged revisions, viz the backlogs and delays in edits appearing resulting from implementing it over more than a very limited number of articles. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:26, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
97. Oppose Goes against Wikipedia spirit. Tim Q. Wells (talk) 02:51, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
98. Absolutely not. Anti-Wiki. Ed Wood's Wig (talk) 02:51, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
99. Strongly Oppose The idea of flagged revisions is just... bad, and this really goes against what Wikipedia is. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rockstone35 (talk • contribs) 02:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
100. Oppose Will not do anything useful but make it impossible to have an open Wikipedia. --Patrick (talk) 03:32, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
101. Oppose Obstacle in the path for an open Wikipedia. --Amid —Preceding undated comment was added at 21:57, 19 January 2009 (UTC).

• • Note, above is this account's second contribution.— Dædαlus ^Contribs 22:01, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Opposes 101–200

101. Oppose. Not proven to be effective at increasing the quality of Wikipedia. A trial would undoubtedly lead to a widespread deployment, no matter what the results are. --- RockMFR 04:19, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
102. Oppose It discourages new editors from being bold. --Pgp688 (talk) 04:35, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
103. Oppose per Ozob. I will support this only when there is a specific consensus on the scope of the proposal, and a specific set of outcomes under which the test is judged to have been a success or a failure. Some proper references regarding the relevant experimental methodologies (preferably published in sources that would pass muster for inclusion in a Wikipedia article) should also be given in the proposal. siℓℓy rabbit (talk) 05:33, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
104. Oppose what we have proposed here is far too vague. Given the huge number of applications of flagged revisions which have been suggested, we need a specific proposal detailing exactly what this feature is to be used for and who gets what rights, and I agree that a trial may well lead to an implementation even if it is a complete disaster. Hut 8.5 07:46, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

     I did create an example of a specific type of implementation that could be done with flagged revisions, you might want to take a look at this proposal. Y. Ichiro (talk)

105. Weak Oppose Strong oppose: While I think a quasi-stable version of Wikipedia would be great, this system just sucks (pardon my french). In theory, its a great way to catch hidden vandalism, but in reality, most articles aren't going to get the thorough check they need before being flagged. Too much bureaucracy, more work for a small group of core editors who have better things to do, etc etc, yadda yadda, all been said above. I say we just suck it up and wait out the 500 years until all articles are featured :-D -RunningOnBrains 09:13, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
106. Not for another ten years. Not joking. We're not yet strong enough as a pedia to pull this off (as per everybody else's comments). Maybe in ten years we will be able to ignore anons. Maybe. Matt Yeager ♫ (Talk?) 10:29, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
107. Oppose, if the question is to enable Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Trial, right now I would have to say no because it appears incomplete, with too many unanswered questions. Better would be a straw poll on the specifics of the proposed configuration (or other proposals), and perhaps a straw poll on the details of a guideline for Flagged Revisions. --Pixelface (talk) 10:59, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
108. Oppose To suggest that people have to have every change validated by someone else smacks of big brother-ism and is very much contrary to the basic concept that anyone can contribute. Perhaps it would be better to say that in order to edit, an account is required. That would tend to stop, or at least slow, many of those who vandalise only to be disruptive, while still allowing those who wish to contribute positively to do so. Edit - whoops, forgot to sign... Andy Johnston (talk) 12:45, 5 January 2009 (UTC)—Preceding unsigned comment added by Andy Johnston (talk • contribs) 12:41, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
109. Oppose - utterly incompatible with the ideals of Wikipedia. There is already too much fragmentation of the community, and this proposal will only increase that. It will discourage new editors, and dispirit many established ones too. DuncanHill (talk) 13:50, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
110. Oppose (for now) - I've now tried the lab version. I *think* I now understand the usage (though a clear purpose, including an example for instance, would still be welcome as I wrote below)... but the wording and the implementation needs a lot more thought. Firstly, the word "sighted" is horrible (I would suggest "reviewed"). Then I could review pages that had already been reviewed... is that right? Then, I couldn't review intermediate pages (that is, I couldn't mark as "sighted" an older version, which had yet to be "vandalised" by me). Then, I could add a comment while unticking "sighted", but that comment seemed to vanish into the ether. None of this behaviour was in any way intuitive to me. Generally, as someone who sees a lot of IP vandal edits, I would welcome something that stops those edits getting into the article, but I can't quite see how it works in this case - if an IP adds some valid text to a previously vandalised article, that version cannot be marked as "sighted"/"reviewed" because it contains vandalism, and so therefore that text would probably never be seen (how many editors, or "reviewers" would seriously work out which edits to keep before marking the article "sighted". I think this test implementation needs more work and more thinking about use cases before going "live". Stephenb (Talk) 14:13, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

     Although I'm on the other side of the vote, I think you make a very good point with respect to "reviewed" being much better than "sighted". Thank you for that. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

111. Oppose - Didn't scale on German Wikipedia, still thousands of pages completely unflagged. Didn't prevent vandalism, either. Frustrates junior editors --Pgallert (talk) 15:17, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
112. Oppose, until we have some agreement as to what articles should be flagged. The two proposals I have seen so far are either unwieldy (flag everything), or present a serious issue with responsibility shifting which I detailed here, and mentioned here. The latter problem is one with some potentially serious legal consequences for good-faith volunteer flaggers, and I have not seen any response to that concern from those supporting flagged versions. The issues surrounding that need to be cleared up before we implement a mechanism like this. Sjakkalle (Check!) 15:51, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
113. Oppose Adopting flagged revisions on any scale is a bigger restriction to Wikipedia than requiring all editors to register, which we don't do. The results of any trial will not be representative of the full-scale adoption most of its proponents seem to support. I'm also concerned that this mechanism amounts to an additional claim of reliability, something I would like the project to avoid. Wikipedia aspires to be an encyclopedia, but it must also remain a wiki, and it's potentially dangerous to pretend otherwise. Ntsimp (talk) 16:10, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
114. Oppose per Cybercobra etc –Sarregouset (talk) 16:23, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
115. Oppose - It would be much simpler to ban un-signed-in edits from IP addresses. MRM (talk) 17:39, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
116. Oppose, my experience on German wiki was horrible with this system. JACOPLANE • 2009-01-5 18:00
117. Oppose - The system of everyone-can-edit with all its flaws is still preferable to this. --Saddhiyama (talk) 19:21, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
118. Oppose - As if we didn't have enough classes of users already. Bikasuishin (talk) 19:38, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
119. Oppose I don't trust the promise that a trial brings with it no intertia. Also, I oppose for the various reasons I have stated in the numerous past "polls, straw polls, testing the waters, etc." in which I have participated. Protonk (talk) 19:50, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
120. Oppose - Per User:Pmanderson's rationale in oppose #2 (or #3, I forget). Chrislk02 ^{Chris Kreider} 20:13, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
121. Oppose - Adding flagged revisions would create this unnecessary step of editorial review. It makes Wikipedia far less accessible, not confirming to the "anyone can edit" philosophy, and just plainly assumes bad faith. -- クラウド６６８ 22:13, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
122. For my reasons stated here. Altering the protection policy to allow quicker placement of semi/full-protection on pages, and/or expanding the list of pages that should be permanently protected will be far more easy to implement and to manage than flagged revisions for the English Wikipedia. Acalamari 22:15, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
123. Strong Oppose to this whole concept, it makes a mockery of "anyone can edit." I even notice that editors I've had "skirmishes" with agree here. (If you want a "stable" or "more correct" "Wikipedia," revive the Nupedia idea, or go see Theopedia or Conservapedia.) TuckerResearch (talk) 22:53, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
124. Oppose ^^^ --sss333 (talk) 23:58, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
125. Oppose--Cube lurker (talk) 00:25, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
126. Oppose Also, polls and votes are not debates. I don't understand why this was allowed to become one.Leodmacleod (talk) 0:31, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
     • Because we didn't have the debate before the poll. It's actually a good debate, and the next proposal should be better. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:51, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
127. Oppose Stan J. Klimas (talk) 00:43, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
128. Oppose per all the above. Arkon (talk) 01:37, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
129. Oppose Unnecessarily undermines the idea that the encyclopedia is open for anyone to edit. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 01:57, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
130. Oppose - would make basic Wikipedia improvements, such as trying to get an article up to FA, difficult for all people without the ability to oversight their own contributions. Furthermore, creates a new way to editwar - as if we needed that! Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 03:48, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
131. Strongly Oppose -- Mdandrea (talk) 06:19, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
132. Oppose - There are better innovations to try to improve WP. Experience on German WP for FLR isn't promising. Rd232 ^talk 07:18, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
133. Oppose. Sorry if this rehashes a discussion that has already occurred, but I abandoned my previous account because I was getting too involved with Wikipedia politics and bureaucracy and I just don't have the patience or inclination to wade through everything that has been discussed on this page. I have, however, reviewed the proposal and oppose it for being an unnecessarily complicated solution to a problem that is already being handled somewhat effectively with existing methods. Recently, en.wikipedia implemented a new process for new page patrollers to flag new pages. Unexamined pages turn up in orange (or was it yellow?) on the new page patrol page, and any autoconfirmed user could click as patrolled and that page would be un-highlighted. Why can't that system be implemented for any changes when looking at the recent changes page? Even extend it to watchlists. That method effectively distributes the volunteer labor pool that is available so you don't have 40 RC patrollers reviewing the same legitimate edit to the penis page by an anonymous user while other vandalism edits slip past unnoticed. Meanwhile, the encyclopedia remains one that anybody can edit. Edit conflicts are frustratig when they happen, but imagine if I'm trying to copyedit a low-traffic article that hasn't been "approved" by the privileged elite and some other editor also tries to do the same? Not only can't I see my own edits, but I can't see the fact that some other editor has already modified the same paragraph to fix the same problem, but only with different wording? One of us just wasted a bunch of time. No thank you. (P.S.; now that I've stated my opinion, I'll also note that I'm not going to follow the result or watchlist this page, so if anybody wants to follow up on this, please drop me a note on my talk page and let me know if further comment is requested). Henry8787 (talk) 09:35, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     I never knew about the orange thing, and agree it's a great idea, especially to implament onto watchlists (though it could backfire too -- not everyone reverts all obvious vandalism they see̲, even if on their watchlist). But I one thing I think you're missing is that, I believe, anyone logged in will see the most recent (unsighted or sighted) version, weather or not they are a sighter. At least I'm almost positive this is an option that can be turned on at the dev level; but more importantly, when you EDIT you're always shown the most recent version -- you can't have multiple branches of unsighted edits. And befor you say "this may confuse people", it already happens a lot in fast changing articles, after all. So I think your worries here are unfounded. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 12:41, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     This is correct: any logged-in user will always see the most recent version of every page (with a note saying either that "this article is 'up to date'" or that "there are some changes that need review"). Whenver anyone goes to the edit window, they see the most recent version of the wikitext, and if there are changes between that code and the stable version, they are highlighted in a diff above the edit box so they can see exactly what has changed (and revert any vandalism that has crept in). Happy‑melon 15:34, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     That is something else which should be explained clearly in the next take on this; I had been wondering about that myself. It is a very bad idea: It means that editors (the minority) do not see what most readers see; which means that if a sighted entry contains vandalism or error, and an anon fixes it, editors will not notice that anything needs to be done. See WP:Autoformatting for a similar problem. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:54, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

134. Oppose I agree with the above and favor it as the better solution. Wandalstouring (talk) 09:43, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
135. Oppose as generating an additional work overhead. Category:Wikipedia backlog has already got hundreds of thousands of problems. Stifle (talk) 12:53, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
136. Oppose "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is a cornerstone to this project and serves as a hook to attract new users. Don't make this cornerstone a sham. These flags would be an insult to newcomers and create a barrier to entry. Watch the rate of new users drop drastically. Furthermore, these flags would create more hierarchy, more backlogs and more red tape. I hope everyone takes Thor Malmjursson's comments here seriously. Gnangarra also makes a good case against all this. Lastly, I fear if this is granted a trial implementation, there will be no turning back, and it will become fully implemented. Kingturtle (talk) 13:19, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     With flagged revisions anyone still can edit an article as opposed to semi protection or protection were people cannot. Flagged revisions allows removing protection. Finally, you don't want to have a trial because you're afraid it will work out and be found to be a good thing? I'll never figure out the opposition to the only option we have that can solve the vandalism problem. Unless a workable alternative is proposed, opposing flagged revisions is holding Wikipedia back. - Taxman ^Talk 15:30, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     It does not solve the problem, it just creates another layer of work. Protection is plain simple "Sorry, a large number of people want to destroy good content, please stand by", it treats everyone the same. Flagged revisions is "Sorry, we assume you are a vandal, so a special user™ (who we do not want to call elite but that is what they are) will check if your contribution is worthy". But the problem is not solved: Apply flagged revisions only to some articles, vandals will vandalize others. Apply it to all and masses of good anon editors are scared away because the thrill of seeing what you added disappears and it will lose us a bunch of users as it did de-wiki. Any way, flagged revisions will actually get vandals what they want - that we lose good content due to their actions. Whether directly by their actions or indirectly, the vandals will reach their goal and hurt us. So forgive those opposing that they don't want to implement something that does not solve the problem but creates more work and sacrifices the ability of everyone to edit freely. SoWhy 16:09, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     I don't agree that "what vandals want" is that "we lose good content due to their actions". While there are certainly committed vandals who want precisely that, and who have developed very elaborate means of causing as much damage as possible, the vast majority of vandalism comes from people who get a tiny buzz out of seeing the eight-most-popular website in the world calling their classmate a wombat. That is the sort of vandalism that FlaggedRevisions can stop, by breaking the 'itch-scratch' cycle of "break a page"→"see that page broken immediately". Yes, it also breaks the cycle of "fix a page, see that page fixed immediately", which we all agree is not a Good Thing. But unlike the casual vandalism, we continually encourage such positive edits to register accounts and become more involved, if only because it means they're more likely to stay and become active contributors. IPs are most useful not as a source of edits, but as a source of editors. In my opinion, knowing that with the trivial step of creating an account they can see their edits immediately visible, is likely to encourage that process, not discourage it. Of course I have no evidence to support that claim, just as there is no evidence to prove otherwise. We desperately need hard data to justify such assertions. Hence the proposal for a trial period. Happy‑melon 16:21, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     Actually it perfectly solves the problem. Vandalism is not shown to readers of the encyclopedia if that option is chosen. Protection completely removes the ability of some or most people to edit freely, while again, flagged revisions allows everyone to edit freely. Indeed it does require more work, but no one said you could write an encyclopedia without doing any work. And can you confirm the cause of less users on de-wiki or is that speculation? I'm 100% sure there is no way to know and there are less active users on en.wiki anyway. There is something else going on. Finally, no content is lost with flagged revisions. At most someone has to wait a little while to see it. How long do you have to wait between updated revisions of books and textbooks you read or non wiki websites you want to improve? I find that most opposition to flagged revisions are based on similarly incorrect premises. - Taxman ^Talk 18:24, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     Pages are not currently only protected due to blatant vandalism. I very much doubt that unless the use of the 'sight' function is absolutely restricted to simply certifying that no obvious vandalism exists, the number of protected pages that can be released won't be many at all. MickMacNee (talk) 22:02, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     No, it doesn't. Please read the discussion below. The most dismaying part of this poll is the facile optimism that FR will solve BLP's, which they can't, or eliminate vandalism, which they won't. If a reviewer ever slips, FR will tend to preserve whatever vandalism he missed. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:54, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     In the extremely small proportion of cases where that may happen, we're not really much worse off than where we are now. However in the vast majority of cases, where schools for example can't (or shouldn't) in good conscience use Wikipedia content because any page at any time may be vandalized, the users of Wikipedia would be much better off with flagged revisions. And the users of Wikipedia vastly outnumber the editors by orders of magnitude. Users shouldn't have to learn how to go into the edit history and search for and compare versions to find one that is vandalism free. So it all comes down to being careful about not missing vandalism in sighted versions. - Taxman ^Talk 19:04, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     They don't have to. They have to wait a few minutes, or fix it themselves. This will not (it can't with reasonable effort) remove inobvious vandalism, and RCP does a quite good job at removing obvious vandalism. For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, direct, obvious, and wrong; this is ours. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:13, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     Readers don't and shouldn't have to know about things like that. And waiting for a few minutes often doesn't work since a) it may not have been fixed at all and b) it may be vandalized again. And unfortunately RC patrol doesn't do a good enough job at fixing vandalism since it can't. Vandalism is visible on pages for a substantial proportion of page views. Finally, you're opposed to a trial because you're convinced it won't work. Brilliant. Trouble is there is evidence it is working. - Taxman ^Talk 20:03, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     No, I am opposed to this because the test protocol was never thought through; my reasons are clearly stated at #3. The airy assumptions that a test of FR cannot do harm, and FR must be able to solve our problems are unfounded, however, and support !votes based on them should be discounted proportionately. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:33, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well if one were to start discounting, you'd then have to discount the oppose votes based on horridly flawed rationale such as "FR wouldn't allow anyone to edit", etc of which there are many and several types. - Taxman ^Talk 21:55, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     "Flagged revisions allows removing protection" is also a flawed rationale. MickMacNee (talk) 01:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

137. Oppose This sounds like a pretty big step, and I think it will be an exploit for the vandals... -- ErnestVoice ^{(User) (Talk)} 19:52, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
138. Very Strongly Oppose Firstly, what the proposal amounts to is saying to editors: "Sure, anyone can edit Wikipedia--but only in a sandbox, that no one else will see. Nobody but authorized officials can do real editing." I don't care if the Germans like to be treated in this demeaning way. The day this policy is implemented I will request my editing account closed, and I will never edit again.
     Secondly, what we're proposing to create is a layer of bureaucratic overseers lording it over the editors. Wikipedia is already groaning under the weight of all the self-appointed critics on private ego trips, who restrict their activity to flagging articles and chiding the overworked and patient bona-fide editors. Why should we be providing an official niche for people who view the project as a way of fulfilling their power fantasies? Create a layer of bosses who do nothing but affix--and withhold--rubber stamps of approval, and a lot of actual editors will quit. I certainly will. Freederick (talk) 21:28, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

     Sigh, it's comments like this I can't understand at all. Do you not see how it's very little different from how it is now? Edits can easily be reverted now -- the difference with FR is that a good percentage (I dunno the numbers, but I've seen it very high) of people just don't nessesarily see the most recent edit(s). Yes, this may prevent them from seeing good edits but had they looked a week ago it wouldn't have been there either, right? But it also prevents them from seeing the vandalism, which can be pretty bad. People often complain about the lack of censorship on WP, but at least we try to keep to relevent places -- vandalism takes away from the effort. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 22:02, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

139. Oppose Only because this functionality is limited to a specific, new usergroup. We can come up with a better proposal that allows the entire community (or at least, logged-in users) to be involved. -- smurdah^{[citation needed]} 22:04, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
140. Oppose More bureaucracy + more technocracy = disaster. --Folantin (talk) 22:09, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
141. Oppose I want a specified end date of the test before I can support one. Reywas92^Talk 22:22, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
142. Oppose Current protocol sufficiently deals with vandalism. All this does is add significant bureaucracy, yet another level of administration, and does not in practice improve wikipedia at any level. Additionally, it's not a test if there's no end date, it's simply a limited implementation. -Drdisque (talk) 22:39, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
143. Oppose. The idea just doesn't go with the spirit of Wikipedia, and would be too hard to implement. Jagun^Talk_Contribs 01:21, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
144. Oppose. per User:Gnangarra, said it perfectly. OlEnglish (talk) 02:21, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
145. Oppose as currently implemented The implementation from the point of view of the registered user that understands what is going on is fine, and I do support that, but the implentation from the POV of the IP user is terrible and need to be improved greatly before I can support this proposal. see Test page? Dbiel ^(Talk) 04:42, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
146. Opposed. Yaki-gaijin (talk) 08:30, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
147. Oppose. Every time I edit, I see Once you click the Save button, your changes will be visible immediately. Obviously that appeals to vandals. It also appealed greatly to me when I started here, and I've never vandalized. It was/is satisfying to correct typos and other errors and leave a page better than I found it. I gradually "got into it", did research, and improved and wrote articles. I'm sure that a great many others "got into it" in a similar way, and wouldn't have bothered if changes weren't visible immediately. I oppose because I believe recruitment would be harmed. - Hordaland (talk) 14:46, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

     Additional and more important argument for my oppose. Having followed the discussion this last week or so, I conclude that the most important reason to oppose is the "slippery-slope" argument. As user SoWhy says elsewhere: Many bad things were introduced step-by-step, grinding away opposition by saying "it's just limited cases". This proposal having already consumed hundreds, probably thousands, of man-hours will, if adopted, continue to do so for each of an unspecified number of trials, eventually, perhaps, "grinding away opposition". The arguments in support do not outweigh this concern. - Hordaland (talk) 01:28, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

148. Oppose per experience at DE-WP. All in all a waste of time, see #Comments from DE-WP for a more detailed statement. --X-Weinzar (talk) 15:20, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
149. Oppose. I think we are approaching a diminishing returns on vandalism prevention. Regardless of intent, this seems to add problems with {reviewer} edit (rev?) wars and possibly others. As a minimalist and general hippy, the additional beaurocracy layer is unattractive—I am reminded of the abstraction and disconnectedness of the micro-management system. While this method may also reduce vandalism, it may turn off more benevolent users as well. I suppose I am not opposed to the trial of the method, however I am opposed to the implementation. —Archon Magnus^{(Talk | Home)} 15:33, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
150. Oppose. This gets in the way of contributions from newcomers and could be discouraging. Also, articles as viewed by registered users should match as closely as possible articles as viewed by unregistered visitors. Cmadler (talk) 18:22, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
151. Oppose No   «l| Ψrometheăn ™|l»  (talk) 18:31, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
152. Oppose I think a wiki should be instant. Computerjoe's talk 18:55, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
153. Oppose as bad idea with no remitting graces that can only damage the project. Thanks, SqueakBox 20:24, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
154. Oppose because this plan is inherently bad by adding another layer of aristocracy, and because there are other viable options for fighting vandalism (e.g. eliminating ip editing of mainspace pages). Alohasoy (talk) 20:59, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
155. Oppose Backlog, backlog, backlog. This will be a huge mistake. Much prefer semi-protection. For further details on my rationale, please see User:Chasingsol/FlaggedRevs --Chasingsol^(talk) 23:20, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
156. Strong Oppose I first edited as an IP, and I liked to see that the changes I made were constructive from the get-go, and that's what kept me hooked. Spencer^T♦C 01:38, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
157. Oppose -- too much work & too long backlog for marginal benefit. Renata (talk) 02:19, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
158. Strong oppose. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:45, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
159. Strong oppose It goes against the spirit of wikipedia.--Kiyarrlls-talk 05:14, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
160. Oppose to present version of the trial. We must first decide that a vast majority of users will be automatically enrolled as "reviewers". I would definitely vote "no" unless any registered user would be automatically enrolled as a reviewer, perhaps with a few obvious formal limitations (no blocks during last year; no official editing restrictions; at least 1000 edits and perhaps something else). But this had to be decided prior to this poll. Another legitimate concern is deterring IP users, but that would not prevent the trial in my opinion.Biophys (talk) 05:16, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
161. Weak Oppose Too often I see pages marked protected with only light vandalism in the history. Protected pages place a barrier for anonymous contributors that often discourages them from bothering. A feature that allows them to contribute anyway, instead of blocking them outright, would be a nice addition to this wiki. So if the feature is implemented on a limited scale, say for a specific IP range and/or specific articles where vandalism is a problem I say go for it. As long as it lessens to use of protect.--Anss123 (talk) 07:18, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
162. Oppose. In my early usage of Wikipedia, I, too, enjoyed the feeling that a new contributor was assumed to be trustworthy until proved otherwise. There's also the big backlog issue here.Astral Highway (talk) 10:23, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
163. Strong Oppose I'm astounded at this. Whatever happened to the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"? Will new editors be attracted to the project when they see something like this? Sounds to me like a good way to reduce participation even more. Chamal ^talk 13:14, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

     In practice, we are currently "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit except semi-protected and protected pages" - one of the ideas is that this could in some way override our need to use semi and full protection as often as we currently do, and would allow all editors to contribute to a greater number, if not all, articles. This isn't a poll to turn on flagged revisions for all articles, or indeed any article. It's just the technical means to run any trials, which would require a separate consensus to run - one of the proposed trials is to use FlaggedRevs in the way I've described, but without this poll passing to allow the software to be turned on, there's no point even discussing limited trials Fritzpoll (talk) 13:20, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

     While I see protection as a necessary precaution that is implemented under special circumstances, I'm afraid I can't think the same way about flagged revisions. My concern is that new editors (ones who have just found out that they can edit here) will be intimidated and discouraged from contributing to the project, as I have said above. I'm aware of what this poll is about btw. I don't know if I'm stupid but I'm definitely not that stupid :) Chamal ^talk 13:49, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

164. Opposed First off, a small-scale test wouldn't establish anything. The problem with idea is that when its scaled up, the backlog swells. And that issue is likely to be even more serious here then it is on German Wiki. As others have pointed out, it makes the "Encyclopedia anybody can edit" slogan into a farce. Oh sure, anybody can still edit, but only the editor can see the change until it is approved by some bureaucrat. I can think of lots of other ideas for reducing vandalism: semi-protect the top 1,000 vandalized articles; soft-block any IP associated with vandalism for six months; and make vandals do counter vandalism "community service" to get their rights reinstated. Kauffner (talk) 14:09, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

     My comment was simply that as this won't apply to every single page, and possibly not even beyond those that new editors are unable to edit at present, I didn't understand why you would oppose trialling the FlaggedRevs extension. The reason I explained it in the way I did was because your comment implied that new editors would be put off at finding all pages closed off to them in this way, which is not what is being proposed here or anywhere else afaik Fritzpoll (talk) 14:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

     I think this is in reply to my earlier comment above Kauffner's vote? Then first of all, I assure you that I did not take your comment personally or as made in bad faith (or anything like that). As for my oppose, I just don't think it's a very good idea to be implemented. It's true that all pages will not be "closed" to new editors, but even so I think it will be harmful. This is just my personal opinion on this. I daresay the trial will be approved, and if its results are good and disproves my concerns, then of course I will not be aainst its use. Chamal ^talk 15:09, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

165. Oppose per Septentrionalis et al. Personally I think FR may be appropriate for other, smaller projects, but not here. Kwanesum (talk) 15:15, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
166. Oppose Strongly. Drifting away from the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit --catslash (talk) 15:44, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
167. Oppose as unwikipedian - this just isn't where I want to see wikipedia going. Also a small scale test would probably work - a large scale implementation would just turn RC patrol and NP partol into a logistical nightmare. Usrnme h8er (talk) 16:04, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
168. Oppose Per all of the above (esp Pmanderson). It has an anti-"we're all in this together" feel to it. There are very dedicated vandal patrollers here, I just don't see a real need for this. Marcia Wright (talk) 16:57, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
169. Oppose - The fundamental principle of Wikipedia is: "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". -MBK₀₀₄ 17:33, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
170. Oppose; flagged revisions are only going to create backlogs and piss off good anon editors, who will notice that their helpful edit doesn't show up (factoring in the cache) and leave or start vandalizing in an attempt to get their edit "noticed". All FlaggedRevs is gonna do is further establish IP editors as second-class citizens. -Jéské Couriano ^{(v^_^v)} 22:39, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
171. Oppose; --Farbotron (talk) 23:04, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
172. Oppose Don't like the idea of so many subsets of Users, and don't like the implications of its implementation: the restricting of the possibility to freely edit on Wikipedia. Debresser (talk) 23:56, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
173. Oppose More fine text under "anyone can edit"? No. Icy // ♫ 01:27, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
174. Strongly Oppose The idea of flagged revisions is just... bad, and this really goes against what Wikipedia is. Rockstone35 (talk) 02:03, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
175. Oppose 1) This is punishing everyone for the crimes of anon IPS and fools, the latter of which I've seen relatively few. Better to just have a combination of limited "free" anonymous edits followed by registration of users and sanctioning of those who misbehave. 2) This will create cliques that go around approving each other's (often crappy) edits while doing what they can to stifle other better material, especially on controversial topics. It already happens to a certain extent with tag teaming, canvassing, secret emails etc. on the Israel-Palestine issue, necessitating a whole Arbitration/Palestine-Israel articles in early 2008. Don't let the apparatchiks totally take over. 3) And then there's the backlog issue. Who are you paying to do all that work?? Look at all the crap that persists for years in current articles!! Better to pay people to help people learn to edit better and sanction those who don't. CarolMooreDC (talk) 02:56, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
176. Strongly Oppose I have been a Wikipedia editor for many years now, championing the idea that this projct is something which encourages participation, and extends its ethos to anyone who wishes to contribute. To introduce this "layer" of checking, however minor, is a building of a wall between the ordinary user and the project's main aims. I respectfully request that this trial is cut to the briefest possible time limit, and for the fight against vandalism (which I support) is carried out another way doktorb _words^deeds 05:09, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
177. Oppose As with the others, I think that this just defeats the purpose of "Anyone can edit". Sure they can edit, but not many people will see their changes (I'm assuming most readers have not registered)! --wj32 ^t/c 09:59, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
178. Oppose - primarily for the reasons as stated by Richard75 above - "This is a really bad idea. It will deter new editors, since the intial appeal of contributing to the encyclopedia "anyone can edit" is being able to see your changes online immediately. Would anyone bother if their edit amounted to no more than a saved preview? I doubt it" - fchd (talk) 10:34, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     But people will see anyway -- the only difference is that an anon is more likely to have something changed already when they start to edit (which certainly happens as it stands now). If anyone adds an unsighted edit, they will be taken to the draft page after they are done editing, so they WILL see the new changes immediately. Also, anyone can switch between the sighted and the draft -- it's just a matter of what is shown on initial arrival at the page. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 12:34, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     estimated is that 1 in every 100 visitors finds the edit button, so what would be the estimate for people who find the edit button AND figure out that they are looking at the wrong version ? Mion (talk) 13:11, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     When the 'edit button' actually says "edit draft" and the edit screen has a large notice over the top saying "edits made here will be incorporated into the stable version when an authorised user reviews them" (or something similar, I'm sure we'll customise it)? I give our readers enough credit to assume they're not completely stupid. How many of the other 99 readers are actually looking for the edit button? Happy‑melon 14:19, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     We dont know how many were looking for the edit button but could not find it, so the number of people who could find it is the thing to work with, now this clear sign (large notice at the top), has shown on the German wikipedia that two of every three anonymous editors will leave the project, not taking into account the number of registered people that will leave the project, so i'm curious what sort of text you would like to add to the large notice to prevent that. Mion (talk) 14:29, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Do you have evidence to support that rather bold claim that the number of IP editors on de.wiki has fallen by 66% since FlaggedRevisions was introduced? I certainly haven't seen any data that would support that conclusion. Happy‑melon 14:31, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     The statistics * [2] (updated September 2008), User:Hut_8.5/German_editing_stats (2009),[3] (2009), [4] (live), de:Spezial:Statistik (live) Mion (talk) 14:36, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Are there similar statistics to these for a wiki other than de.wiki? Perhaps en.wiki or fr.wiki (or a wikimedia-wide agregate)? Without a control sample to remove systemic error it is impossible to say what proportion of the decline in IP edits (which I agree is present, although probably by closer to one third than two) was caused by the introduction of FlaggedRevs. Happy‑melon 14:47, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Sorry, but the statistics of Hut_8.5 do not show a decline in IP edits since the introduction of flagged revisions. There has been a decline of IP edits on de-WP, but that was long before the introduction of flagged revisions in May 2008. IP edits are, as far as we can tell, completely unaffected. Graphically, you can see that in de:Datei:Sichtungsstatistik_Diagramm_2008-10-10.jpg from October 2008. IP edits are in blue, the introduction of flagged revs is where the yellow area starts to emerge. --P. Birken (talk) 14:56, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Source of the graphics: de:Benutzer:IP_91.121.86.154/Sichtungsstatistik Mion (talk) 15:16, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     As I understand it, statistics from pl.wiki and ru.wiki are collected but that will take a few months before enough data is collected, as for the 1/3 2/3 , the anon numbers on the German wiki were as high as 40 % , until de 1st of Jan, low as 14% , only the last week the number of edits on DE show a minor uplift in edits, we have to see what causes it. Mion (talk) 15:00, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

179. Strongly oppose. As they say in the military, If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It will create more problems than solve them. No.--jeanne (talk) 14:42, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
180. Strong oppose for a bunch of reasons. For this to be mildly workable, all editors would have to be able to flag revisions. But apparently that's not true, and coming up with a bureacracy to decide who has those rights - even for a test - would be hopeless. Secondly this will be weird and confusing for most editors that when they go to edit a page, it may be different from what they saw before thanks to unsighted revisions (multiple people trying to fix the same grammar mistake?). Thirdly this was apparently already tested on German Wikipedia, and a median time of *one week* to flag revisions is entirely unacceptable (needs to be more like "half a day"), so I'd say it was already tried and failed. And as others have already noted, flagged revisions still fails at catching the worst kind of vandalism, maliciously false information, so it's not even that much of an improvement - it only catches low-hanging fruit. (I do think this is a useful feature, but only for things like wiki-based publishing where there are editors-in-chief with flagging rights who release stories as "ready to go" using flagged revisions. But that'd be for much smaller scales with clear lines of authority, which doesn't apply here at all.) SnowFire (talk) 17:41, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
181. Oppose. This is a joke right? Freederick has hit the nail on the head above. Another layer of petty officialdom is the last thing we need here. Discouraging editors is the last thing we need. We're not children. Vandalism is not that big a problem that we need to censor all editors until the usual suspects who are supposedly "trusted" come and look at our edits. Will these "trusted" editors all be experts in the subjects they are censoring? How do we know? Who monitors the ability and/or competence of these "trusted" people? Who decides that they are trusted? This is totally and utterly unacceptable. If editors want to be treated like children rather than groun ups then please go to Citizendium and leave us alone here. Alun (talk) 18:12, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
182. Oppose: I could see this being done for BLPs, but oppose it for all other purposes.—Kww(talk) 18:38, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
183. Strongly oppose. Very bad idea. Implementing this would be the end of a freely edited encyclopaedia for registered editors. -- Necrothesp (talk) 19:28, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
184. Oppose: Article creation/improvement should be as much lean as possible. There should be a balance between the quality, the guidelines/procedures to secure that quality etc. and the effort/time required to provide such quality. Logos5557 (talk) 21:02, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

     Discussions in statistics section [5] reveal that there is no trustable statistics on the percentage of vandalism, yet. There is no proof from german or any other wiki that flag implementation solved the problem, either. Therefore, although the problem is not defined well yet, the "cure" is ready. Before discussing any trial of this flag thing, supporters should have defined the problem with numbers, not with words.Logos5557 (talk) 11:02, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

185. Very Strongly Oppose - Per Alun's, Snowfire's, Gnangarra's and Chamal_N's and countless other user's points. This ruins what this project exists to create: a freely editable encylopedia. Vandalism is not such a problem that this is required, and this will still not make Wikipedia articles any better for citations than it is now. Mattie^TK 21:11, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
186. Strong Oppose Per everyone else. This is just a really bad idea. There is no way it will work on a project this size. It will also be very confusing to newbies and to anonymous editors. It'll make the job of editors that much harder and won't help at all. It'd be a nightmare. Kolindigo (talk) 21:51, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
187. Strong Oppose. If the only alternative is semi-protection of all BLPs, flagged revisions are the lesser of two evils. I would find them a very bitter pill to swallow, though. TotientDragooned (talk) 23:16, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
188. Strong Oppose anything to do with flagged revisions. This obviously goes against the spirit of Wikipedia...if people get frustrated because of two-second article deletions, can you imagine the frustration that will result when their edits to normal articles don't show up? — Huntster (t • @ • c) 01:02, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
189. Oppose this system is useless, setting up different flags by itself don't improve quality of the articles. Implementation of Flaggedrevs in Russian and German wikipedias didn't give any real improvement.DonaldDuck (talk) 03:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
190. Oppose Would complicate things. Who then would decide which edits are good? Big man power issue. I would vote for more liberal use of indefinate protection from anon editing many pages.--Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:23, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
191. Oppose Wow. Per the above opposes, especially Chamal N. This is the encyclopedia where anyone can edit!, or have we forgotten? LittleMountain5 03:58, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
192. Strongly oppose, because that slows down the development process. On browsing facts, the flagged revision is automatically seen, a later development version will be seen only if one wish to edit/maintain, and the contrast when switching from revision to revision will confuse the editor, making him/her abstain from the mental complexity and possible confusion. (This is like transforming Wikipedia to the loony control freak concepts of Citizendum, it's just darn'd stupid). ... said: Rursus (bork²) 12:54, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
193. Oppose, slows everything down. While it is a good idea on paper I don't think this could ever benefit a website the size of this one. Garden. 15:05, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
194. Oppose Really don't like the sound of this. The attraction and the magic of Wikipedia is in the immediacy and simplicity of the editing Bobathon (talk) 20:26, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
195. Oppose It just complicates things that don't need to be complicated, and may make new users think they've got to learn all about the lunacy WP would be with FlaggedRvs before they could be bold. I know my answer even before the trial. And we're not reaching consensus here...so what happens?--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 20:35, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
196. Oppose There's plenty of bureaucracy and convention for new users to get caught up in as it is.--llamapalooza87 (talk) 20:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
197. Oppose Apart from treating IP users as if we're all vandals, this will also cause unending confusion. Using a public computer several months ago, I added several interwiki links to German Wikipedia. When they didn't show up, I was very confused. I had no idea why they didn't appear. It took me some time to realize that my interwiki links had to be manually approved. This still makes no sense to me. Requiring manual approval isn't practical. And this will also cause confusion. This will hurt much more than it could ever help. 141.151.174.108 (talk) 21:54, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
198. Oppose Flagged revisions are contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia—that is, "everyone can edit". The majority of edits on Wiki come from anons, and sure, they can still edit, but no one's going to see their edits for the most part. Add to that the fact that Wiki has close to 2.75 million articles; to review them all would probably take at least a year to even get through the first iteration, and because articles are edited every day, we would never be done. It seems like another endless bureaucratic process that has at best questionable value. Lastly, someone mentioned above (and I agree with this assessment) that this will ultimately drive away new users. Can we afford to do so, given the decline in public participation?. I know if this had been in effect when I started editing a couple years ago I might have said "You're too good for my edits? Screw off, then." And I'm sure I wouldn't have been the only one. Parsecboy (talk) 00:48, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
199. Strong oppose - Unnecessary, damaging to our project, and contrary to our project's spirit. This is not Citizendium and we do not need "constables" to approve edits. Our project works quite well as is, and vandalism is quickly undone due to conscientious editors' watchlists. Badagnani (talk) 02:48, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
200. Oppose - I'm new as an editor and don't expect my thoughts to carry much weight, but: In the vein of "Letter of the law vs. Spirit of the Policy" ... There are already too many letters of the law, and their crushing the spirit of the intent of Wikipedia under their weight. Ched (talk) 03:05, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Opposes 201–300

201. Oppose-Yuck. I don't like to log in all the time, it's a bother, yet I was ip flagged for updating moved links in a batch already...I write quite a bit but usually prefer not to use my username because it just seems to encourage politics and other silly behavior. I prefer "Oh, that," to, "Oh, YOU," iykwim. Also, it seems this would encourage page squatters ("MINE," how dare you edit me!)even more. Bad, bad, bad idea. Like someone above noted, a test nearly always leads to implementation, regardless of outcome. Infinitysnake (talk) 03:16, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
202. Strong oppose. This breaks the spirit of Wikipedia - how many people will edit when they know that their contribution is being watched and judged by big brother. Much better to required logged in users when editing - problem pages only. Drpixie (talk) 06:25, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
203. Strong oppose Lowering the threshhold for restricting edits makes it more likely pages will get restricted. Restriction should be avoided. There are already enough people on Wikipedia who think they know more than others. This will make the problem worse. Qoz (talk) 09:06, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     This is the user's first and only edit. Spencer^T♦C 18:43, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     In this !vore we should give especially high weight to the opinions of IPs and newly-registered users. PaddyLeahy (talk) 18:54, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

204. Strongest possible oppose - This defeats the purpose for why Wikipdia was made. Isn't Wikipedia the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit? Flagged revisions waste time, and ensures that not all people can edit it. ₰imon_K^S_K 16:32, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     Just a note that this poll is not about whether we should implement flaggedrevs on all articles, but whether we can enable the proposed configuration, in the aim to make trials that will have to be supported by consensus. We have various proposals, for example using it in place of semi-protection to allow IP-editing (any autoconfirmed user being able to flag) or as an alternative to full protection to handle disputes, and nothing else; or limiting it to revisions that have been automatically identified as probable vandalism. I share the view that a full, unrestricted implementation would be unwise, but this is not the only option we have. Cenarium (Talk) 19:19, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     Comment - Even though I realise that Jimbo's word isn't law - it should be noted that he voted in favour of the trial -- despite the fact that he's the one who came up with the idea of "the free encylopedia that anyone can edit". ≈ The Haunted Angel 19:37, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     By your own argument we could just assume that a significant number of supporters were influenced by Jimbo's vote and need to be discounted. How about we just assume that 50% of the support-votes are just "I support because Jimbo wants it" and those users don't really have an opinion on it? Wouldn't that be a good idea instead? SoWhy 19:51, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     It is quite obvious that Jimbo's position has no effect on the poll, which is good. The point of my comment is that many users, both in the oppose and support sections, vote for or against a complete implementation of flaggedrevs, which is off-topic, and have no heed for surrounding discussions and proposals. Cenarium (Talk) 20:27, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     I'd disagree on that, I think Jimbo's position did influence a number of people, that's only natural. We don't know how many though, but my comment was to The Haunted Angel (talk · contribs) who seems to think that the fact that Jimbo vote in favor of removing "Anyone can edit" in certain circumstances is a good argument. SoWhy 21:58, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

     Jimbo's position also influenced people to vote 'no' in this poll, as can be seen in surrounding discussions (being tired of Jimbo, finding that it contradicts his own statement of belief 'anyone can edit', etc). But overall, the influence is minor as most users are unaware of Jimbo's position. It is unfortunate that this unrelated discussion mingled with my initial comment, though. Cenarium (Talk) 22:55, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

205. No Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, not just "flaggers". ~EDDY ^{(talk/contribs/editor review)}~ 19:34, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
206. Aperture Science Computer-Aided Oppose. Anonymous editing makes this encyclopedia! We do NOT have enough active users to moderate users. Message from XENU^{complaints? leave me a message!} 19:47, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
207. Oppose. Trial my arse; would this be the same kind of 'trial' we had for banning anonymous page creation. In general I oppose this. Prior restraint on contribution is yet another obstacle to contributing, antithetical to our model and culture: we don't need to shift even more power from our readers and occasional editors to the hardcore registered users. --Gwern (contribs) 20:37 11 January 2009 (GMT)
208. Oppose per Nigel Ish (#76). Twirligig (talk) 00:05, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
209. Incredibly strong oppose I can see how this would work as a a precursor to semi-protecting a page, but as stated above, anon edits make this encyclopedia. This could not only discourage countless IPs who occasionally edit, but also the many potential future GA and FA writers who get their start editing annonymously. This may cut down a bit on vandalism, but couldn't we just do something similar to what's at Special:Newpages? ErikTheBikeMan (talk) 00:25, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
210. The Strongest Possible Oppose I can't even begin to say how much I oppose this, we are the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and I feel that if everything has to be flagged by someone to be shown, then that will ruin the spirit of our beloved encyclopedia and change us for the worse forever. All the Best, --Mifter (talk) 01:20, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     Very well said. –Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 01:54, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

211. Oppose This proposal goes against the very idea of wikipedia. We are an encyclopedia open to the public, and an encyclopedia that can be edited by the public, at will, this proposal will restrict that and is a dangerous idea. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:08, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
212. Strong Oppose Against the spirit of Wikipedia. Would add unnecessary backlog and bureaucracy. Maximillion Pegasus (talk) 03:15, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
213. Strong oppose - Apart from being the main reason of our success, "anyone can edit" is a foundation issue, a promise made to contributors when the project started. At least my contributions were made on the understanding that this will not change. Zocky | picture popups 04:47, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     By that logic, protection (full and semi) is also against foundation policy. Hell, add banning to that. FR still allows anyone to edit, it's just a matter of how the edit is handled. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 04:52, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     Protection was introduced because it was urgently needed. It's an unfortunate necessary compromise we had to make. It does limit the ability of anyone to edit, but it still allows anyone to see the current revision of the article, to comment on it and to request edits to be made. On the other hand, FR prevents anonymous users from seeing the current revision of the page, and excludes them from the editing process. It's not a limitation of open access to editing, it's a replacement for it. Zocky | picture popups 05:01, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     If FR works here the way it does at de-wp, anonymous users are not prevented from seeing the current revision of the article, it just isn't the first one they see. Rather, when you go to an article, you see the most recent version, but you also a tab between the "article" and the "talk" tab that says "draft", and that's the current unflagged version. There's also a note in the upper right-hand corner that says "Viewed (go to current version)" which supplies another link to the unflagged version. And when an anon makes an edit, after saving he sees the draft version, so his edit is immediately visible to him. This is why we need to test it here, so that people who don't like FR can at least comment about FR the way it actually works rather than the way they fear it might work. —Angr 10:20, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     The very idea that casual users (like my mother for example) are able to understand the difference between draft and article is laughable at best. No, some will see the edit-buttons, even less will edit it and a part of those will complain that their edits do not show up. Heck, de-wiki even confuses me with that flagged-revision stuff and I dare to say I am no newbie, but when I tried to flag an article as sighted some days ago, it just did nothing, no error and nothing. If I get confused by that system, I cannot begin to imagine how complicated it will be for casual editors to figure it out. I think most of them will just give up when they don't see the expected results (most of us think that it's easy to figure out but the point is most of us aren't those editors who will not understand it). SoWhy 12:23, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     I don't get it. Why are people less likely to find the draft button than the edit button? And if they do, their edit WILL show up right away to them. It's only upon coming back later that it might not show up (which can happen NOW just as easily). ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:10, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     After editing, the user sees the draft. And the edit button doesn't change (naming it 'edit draft' instead of 'edit' is not necessary). There is also the possibility to make the Wikipedia cookie redirect to the draft when the person edited it. I'm not defending a full unrestricted implementation here, but this is a general matter. Cenarium (Talk) 16:32, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     So now my edits will show up to me and to those who choose to look at a draft version of the article? But when someone who is deemed "trusted" by the "wiki-police" decides that this edit doesn't correspond to the new "wikiauthority" autoritharian world view, my edit is lost. And no it's not the same as now, whatever Melodia says, now anyone can revert an edit, and anyone can revert back. That's not the same as investing authority in a set of editors who have ultimate authority to decide content on the spurious grounds that they are "trusted". Trusted by who? What is their expertise? Go to citizendium if you want this sort of policing of articles, don't impose your authoritarian instincts here, you are going to kill this project stone dead. It will cease to be what it always has been, a free to edit project. Alun (talk) 16:49, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

     The objective is to prevent vandalism and libel from being seen by IPs, not to police our content. Your edits would be automatically flagged and you would also be able to flag, like most registered users, only users engaging in vandalism or libel would have this right removed. Using flagged revisions in order to control the content more strictly would certainly be a failure and backfire on Wikipedia. Cenarium (Talk) 04:49, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well that presuposes that vandalism and libel are big problems, but I don't think they are, vandalism is a minor problem, and when it occurs it usually gets reverted quickly because anyone can revert an article when there is vandalism in it, and that works perfectly well. I don't know how serious the problem with libel is, but I'd be prepared to bet that it isn't that serious. You need to differentiate between real libel and simple vandalism anyway. Saying that "Joe Blogs is a moron" is not libel, saying that "Joe Blogs has been convicted for fraud" (when he hasn't) is libel. Seriously, if there is constant vandalism and/or libel on a page, then we protect it for a while and block the offending accounts until the vandals get bored go and play somewhere else. We already have very good procedures to cover these problems. The only real use I could conceive for this software would be to prevent the sort of deterioration we sometimes see from former FA articles, that might help maintain the quality of an already high quality article. This smacks of bypassing talk page discussions and putting content in the hands of a few so called "trusted" petty officials, it's the further policing of Wikipedia. IMO there are already serious problems with some admins taking a very chauvinistic attitude to non-admins, who treat us like children. I'm certainly not in favour of replacing debate and consensus building with an elite "content police", and that's what you'll get. Alun (talk) 06:31, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

     If you don't think libel is a problem read User:Doc glasgow/The BLP problem and maybe volunteer for WP:OTRS work. Not that FlaggedRevs alone will be a complete fix. PaddyLeahy (talk) 17:28, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

     Where did I say that libel isn't a problem? Did you read my post at all? Alun (talk) 04:06, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     In fairness, Alun, "Well that presuposes that vandalism and libel are big problems..." does suggest that you aren't sure that libel is a big problem :) Fritzpoll (talk) 09:28, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well I'm not sure libel is a big problem, and that's what I said. But Paddy claimed that I "don't think libel is a problem", which is a different thing altogether. What I actually said was (a) I don't know how big a problem libel is, but maybe not that big, because (b) we already have methods for dealing with it. It's common here on Wikipedia (in my experience) for editors to take a nuanced statement and respond to it as if it's an absolutist position. I said I wasn't sure, and to claim that I was emphatic about it is to build a straw man. Alun (talk) 10:27, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

214. Oppose; it simpy goes against our spirit of openness.Lectonar (talk) 09:42, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
215. Oppose Well-intentioned, but unnecessary, against the spirit of Wikipedia, over-engineered and impractical. A near-perfect example of instruction creep. Gandalf61 (talk) 13:50, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
216. Oppose Seems to take the "wiki" out of Wikipedia... especially when a solution like eliminating IP edits is available. - Masonpatriot (talk) 19:35, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
217. Oppose per others. BreathingMeat (talk) 20:13, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
218. Oppose. --Kubanczyk (talk) 21:50, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
219. Oppose. I do understand the reasoning behind this, but I do not see the implementation going well at all unless you create reviewers, etc, based upon category. At this stage in the project, flagging such globally would be beyond the realms of possibility. There is no one person who is qualified to be a reviewer for all articles, and most will have bias that is not beneficial to the community. Keep the wiki a wiki. --tonsofpcs _(Talk) 02:04, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
220. Oppose. I am a moderate activity user at Wikipedia (2k edits over 3+ years) who edits low editor traffic articles in statistics and radiation physics. I think I am unlikely to be a sighter unless most reasonably experienced editors are sighters. Unless I can sight or my edits or get cited automatically after a certain amount of time after no objection, this would make my edits worthless or make me constantly request sighting from someone who is a sighter (what a pain!). This would drastically reduce my interest in contributing to Wikipedia. If these objections are dealt with, I would say this is a very good idea. An idea: why not make every registered editor with minimal experience (i.e. 150 edits, 3 months experience, and never flagged as a bad person to be a sighter) a sighter and then remove the bad sighters when they make themselves known. PDBailey (talk) 03:38, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

     It's possible and widely agreed upon to have an auto-promotion to 'sighter', like autoconfirmed but a little stronger, in case of massive implementation. Since the trials are of small size, it has not been proposed. But in my view, any interested user with no recent vandalism, spam or libel edits can become reviewer. It's also proposed to flag automatically after a certain time, but as of now it's not technically possible. Though IPs and new users may still experience the above feeling, so any implementation should be restricted both in size and affected edits in my opinion (it's the case for the trials). Cenarium (Talk) 04:32, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

     So it would be like protecting a page? That might make more sense. I think it is important that we gain more than we loose in this policy, and your point about IP / new editors feeling like I said I would is a good one. You do not want to ward off the next wiki dragon because their first 25 edits are not actually made in the article for 4 days. PDBailey (talk) 12:48, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

     The important thing is that supporting this proposal is not supporting anything specific in terms of using Flagged Revisions. Noone will flag an article if this poll passes, since this is just to let us go forward and develop proposals for some very limited trials that will require a further community consensus before being run. As far as I am aware, noone is saying that we should implement this like the Germans have, which is over the entire namespace. Fritzpoll (talk) 09:06, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     Noone ? Wikipedia:Protecting_BLP_articles_feeler_survey#Implement_Flagged_Revisions_for_all_articles_.2F_content_pages Mion (talk) 09:14, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     Well pointed out - what I was trying to say is a) it is not the aim of this proposal, and b) that of the proposed trials at WP:FLR/P, where trial proposals are developed prior to seeking additional consensus, there are none proposing full mainspace implementation. So the upshot was, supporting this trial does not lead to full namespace-wide usage - thanks for allowing me to clarify that Fritzpoll (talk) 09:26, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     I don't want to accuse anyone of lying or having bad intentions, so please don't take this the wrong way, but each time I read this argument being made it translates into "No one has the intention of erecting a wall!" in my head. I wonder why... SoWhy 09:39, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     It's a slippery slope. Kill it here and kill it now and kill it for good. Alun (talk) 10:37, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     Fritzpoll, I do not see the moderation that I said would be a prerequisite to my supporting this in the proposal, nor do I see a clear research design for collecting further information. Because of these complaints, I still oppose this proposal. The way I see it, at worst this could turn WP back into Nupedia, at best it could save some articles from being sometimes in a bad state. I probably visit Wikipedia 2-10 times a day for information and have never seen vandalism when doing this, only when acting as an editor and checking my watchlist. That said, I can see the value of doing something for BLP and other articles that are constantly being trashed and are of high value, but I think more thought should go into minimizing the costs to the project than a promise that this is only a trial and that it won't become the whole encyclopedia. PDBailey (talk) 03:55, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

221. Oppose - I didn't like the results over in Germany. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 08:28, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
222. Oppose - I think this proposal will be unfriendly to newcomers and casual/anonymous contributors. We have tools to deal with vandalism, this is unnecessary. --Kraftlos (Talk | Contrib) 12:25, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
223. Oppose Negatives outweigh positives. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 17:28, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
224. Oppose If this were really just a test for the sake of a test then it would be pretty hard to oppose it other than as a waste of time, and if we do do this test I will not freak out (though that doesn't lessen the strength of my oppose vote). The problem I have here is that I see a pretty clear slippery slope from a first test to implementing flagged revs Wiki wide, and that is something I outright oppose (enabling them for BLP's is something I might be open to, and if I thought that was the only target I would be more open to a test, but I don't think that). Over here we have 50-plus editors (including some very experienced ones) already supporting enabling flagged revision for all articles, and my sense is that a testing phase (unless disastrous, but many will be invested in that not happening) will lead somewhat inexorably to widespread flagged revisions. So I put my "no" foot down here as it were given my sense that - whatever folks might say - once this ball gets rolling it's not going to stop. If we had limits set up at the outset and more data from the German or other wikis about how this would work I might feel differently. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 09:05, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
225. Absolute, extreme, and unyielding oppose This is a wiki. Restricting the ability to actually make changes to content will drive editorship down...and editorship is already in decline, thanks to the impositions we have placed on editors, especially anons. That which made Wikipedia great is slowly being destroyed, and this "trial run" — which is a trojan horse; anyone who thinks that flagged revisions will ever go away after the "trial run" starts should see me on my talk about a bridge I'm selling — is a step down a slippery slope. If this trial run is implemented, the threat to the future of the encyclopedia is so severe that a campaign of civil disobedience will be necessary — and I will be happy to organize it. Furthermore, free and open editing is a foundational principle, and an extreme supermajority of Wikipedians should be necessary in order to undermine it...there is nowhere near enough support for this monstrosity to ever implement it. Mr. IP 《Defender of Open Editing》 10:08, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

     No pages would be flagged as a result of this proposal passing. FlaggedRevs does not have to be implemented over all pages, and can possibly be used to replace semi-protection and full protection to provide all users a means to contribute to these pages. Have a look at the proposals, each of which would need a separate consensus to begin, and be sure that you aren't willing for a limited trial of something which could be implemented to allow freer editing Fritzpoll (talk) 11:18, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

226. Strong Oppose - Goes against the spirit of the Wiki. -- M2Ys4U ^(talk) 12:49, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
227. Oppose, against the wiki spirit. --Kjetil r (talk) 16:51, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
228. Oppose - As soon as I read what this actually does. My gut feeling was that it was a bad idea. Although as editors we see vandalism constantly, I have found that in actual practice, seeing it is rare. There are already projects for peer reviewed wiki's separate from Wikipedia. We already have a disclaimer, and this would hardly change any of that. And frankly, letting anyone edit Wikipedia is what has made it what it is today, the worlds largest encyclopedia. So anyway, that's my vote. Asmeurer (talk ♬ contribs) 19:34, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
229. Strong Oppose Poor implementation, vague details, trial features does not match proposal or test wiki = Recepie for disaster. - Mailer Diablo 05:23, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
230. Strong Oppose In stead of blatant vandalism (which I don't think is more than 10% of the edits) being reverted immediately, all edits will be subject to watch-overs and such, by more or less biased people. This leads the way for an even bigger group-interest power than there was before, with independent, non-logged or with few edits users being seen directly as possible suspects. Also makes the wiki system a less more transparent. I'd have a few more ideas why this is such a bad idea on so many levels, but I'll stick to oppose. --Anime Addict AA (talk) 13:47, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
231. Oppose As others have said, the idea is Anti-Wiki and against the whole spirit of the project, and gives too much power to an elite group of editors. ShardPhoenix (talk) 14:24, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
232. Oppose Re-iterating some arguments. As I see it, Wikipedia runs on a largely non-hierarchical system. Implementing this provides for a hierarchy which fundamentally undermines the 'anyone can edit' principle. Whilst anyone will still be able to edit, this system acts as a pseudo screening system for edits. Bringing in a hierarchy with all the related problems of corruption and egotism.--Cooper-42 (talk) 15:20, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
233. Strong oppose. Flagged Revisions have been in use on de.wikipedia for a while and there's absolutely no net benefit. Of course, the feature may prevent some of the most blatant vandalism from being displayed to non-registered users. The downside is, it adds an additional layer of complexity, a new hierarchical level of both content (flagged vs. non-flagged) and people (flaggers vs. non-flaggers) that simply isn't justified by the meager benefits. --Thorsten1 (talk) 18:58, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
234. Oppose I can't see what good this could do, and I can see the dangerous potensial. Isn't this supposed to be the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit"? Manxruler (talk) 20:22, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
235. Strong Oppose - This goes against the very spirit of Wikipedia. It is a slap in the face of our editors who choose, for whatever reason, not to have a username. It is disgusting to automatically assume that an edit is unreliable because it comes from an IP address. If this is actually implemented, I may stop editing Wikipedia entirely, since it will have failed to be what it set out to be- a free encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. Nutiketaiel (talk) 20:54, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
236. Oppose. Flagged revisions will be counter-productive goes against the overall principal of wiki. Many more edit oops, revision wars will arise as to which version shall be the live one, deviating from our purpose of building a free and comprehensive encyclopedia (pretending that this doesn't distract us already). —dima/talk/ 21:05, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
237. Oppose. It looks bad. It can not be useful for a reader. --Snek01 (talk) 22:42, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
238. Oppose, although not particularly passionately. I don't think this violates the spirit of wikipidia, but it does seem like an unnecessary complication. The more steps you put between wanting to change something and seeing that change effected, the less likely it becomes that people will bother. As it stands, even anonymous editing requires navigating a complicated maze of "articles", "revisions", "talk pages", "protection", "semi-protection", "reversions", not to mention a whole slew of "policies" and "consensus". Adding "drafts" to that list, and introducing a system whereby what you see isn't what you edit (nor what's actually there!), only serves to firther dissuade potential contributors and thereby concentrate editing to a dedicated elite. I don't think that's morally "wrong", but since it's avoidable, why not avoid it? I don't know, maybe this idea would implement fantastically, but the problem it's supposedly fixing really isn't that critical, so let's err on the side of simplicity. LSD (talk) 01:46, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
239. Oppose This is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. We don't need another bureaucratic process that will only discourage participation creating the impression that only a few are in control of content. --J.Mundo (talk) 06:40, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
240. Very Strongly Oppose This contradicts everything that makes Wikipedia great. Vandalism is held at bay by community vigilance, not by bureaucratic dictat. Think again. There is certainly NO CONSENSUS ACHIEVABLE over this, it is wrong. Riversider2008 (talk) 16:24, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
241. Strong Oppose. This seems to ruin the "wiki" so to speak. I feel this is what attracts people to Wikipedia, the fact that changes can and do go live immediately. Vandalism is usually reverted in seconds, so I see no need to complicate things even further. It appears to just be something else for people to do. While I like the idea of flagged revisions, I feel this idea is completely unsuited to enwiki. Why change what's not broken? I see no real benefits of this. Stwalkerster [ talk ] 16:51, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
242. You have got to be kidding. There is no way that any good will come out of this. PXK ^T /_C 17:06, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
243. Oppose - There is no clear, boxed, bolded, specific, spelled-out proposal. The text at the top of this page refers to the "proposed configuration" as if it is some sort of defined statement, a manifesto for the proposal - instead I follow the link and find a confused mass of if's but's and maybe's - the linked page tells me more about what would be added to localsettings.php than what the specifics of this poll are about. I've spent almost an hour browsing about and have yet to find a boxed set of concise bullet points that define what this poll is specifically on. Sorry folks, if you can't even organise a straw-poll clearly then it gives me no confidence whatsoever that the very serious implications of the introduction of flagged revisions to wikipedia will be managed correctly - or that this poll will not be held up at some future date as a mandate for wide ranging change. SFC9394 (talk) 22:37, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

     This is a vote for a precisely-defined change to the software on English wikipedia: WP:Flagged revisions/Trial#Technical implementation. This would not make any visible change, since no-one would have the surveyor flag, which is needed to enable flagged revs on any given page. But from then on, setting up trials of flagged revs would be a matter for the en:wp community, not requiring action by the devs. The mechanism is: Define proposed trial -> RfC -> bureaucrats enable one or a few surveyors if successful. You should oppose here if you're sure all trials would either fail RfC or fail in practice, and hence be a waste of time, or if you don't trust the bureaucrats to prevent a rogue implementation of Flagged Revs without consensus. PaddyLeahy (talk) 15:32, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

244. Oppose more than life itself. This is the worst idea in the history of Wikipedia. This is not the encyclopedia that people we have deemed worthy can edit and see their work. Its the encyclopedia anyone can edit. This will only serve to drive away potentially good editors. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 02:18, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
245. Oppose. Bleh. Don't even need top say anything. I agree entirely with the other users opposing - Kingpin13 (talk) 11:50, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
246. Oppose. Takes away the right of general users in favour of (a potentially biased) few individual sighters. Goes against the general view of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. What happens when an article is rarely visited by a sighter but has many edits contributed by users? --Rawprawns (talk) 14:30, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

     To your question, the pages show up on special:unflagged drafts or whatever it will be called, and people who currently do RCP should patrol that instead. To your first point, in a full roll-out, the reviewer flag can and should be set automatically for active users, i.e. with a few hundred edits and a month or two's experience (obviously revokable by admins for misuse). This would defeat the object for a small trial, though as the pages/user ratio is important. PaddyLeahy (talk) 15:35, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

     Good point, looking at the number of active sighters on the German wikipedia (User:Hut 8.5/DEWP reviewer stats), there is no indication that the patrol group has any interest to Sight. Mion (talk) 15:58, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

247. Oppose in the strongest possible manner - this goes directly against the principle that anyone can edit wikipedia and have their edits show up, will create backlog to get all the useful edits sighted, and take valuable time away from our more dedicated editors who could be adding content instead of approving edits.Corvus coronoides _talk 14:57, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

     Right now we aim to patrol all new edits. 2/3 of them are by experienced users whose edits would be auto-sighted in a full implementation. Why does checking 1/3 of edits take longer than checking all of them? (NB at present the suggestion is to apply only to a subset of articles anyway so actually you don't get the full benefit!) PaddyLeahy (talk) 15:37, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

248. Very Strong Oppose. 'Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit'. You can't get a more fundamental principle than that, and this proposal blows it to shreds. Cynical (talk) 15:22, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

     Comment should add that if the edited version was displayed by default (with the 'sighted' version as a cookie-powered user option) then I would have no real problem with this. Cynical (talk) 15:25, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

249. Oppose. Not surer it's technically mature, see Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions. Will exclude well-meanining IPs. Wha tdoes it do to registered editor's attempts to improve artciles, especially if geing review for GA / FA? --Philcha (talk) 16:12, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
250. Strong Oppose The way to make an encyclopeida that combines the knowledge of as many people as possible is not this. Flagged revisions will serve only to discourage new users from contributing and challenge vandals to be more destructive elsewhere. Enelson (talk) 18:15, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
251. Oppose This method would make it difficult to make even small revisions, such as spelling, wording, etc. Semi-protected status, on the other hand, would hold editors accountable for their actions while still allowing more freedom to edit. Tad Lincoln (talk) 00:22, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
252. Strong oppose. This flies in the face of Wikipedia's most fundamental principles. Information should not only be available it should be available quickly. That's a big part of what makes Wikipedia so popular - it is very up-to-date. Secondly, what happened to "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"? If we start implementing a policy which means that if an anonymous user edits a page and clicks "Save" only to find that the version that the world sees remains the same, we're heading down a dangerous road which could very possibly leave us with a Cathedral model of content-production, and I don't think any of us want that. --Aseld ^talk 01:09, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
253. Strong oppose This ruins the spirit of Wikipedia!WackoJacko (talk) 01:46, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
254. Strong oppose Wikipedia will no longer be the free encyclopedia 'anyone can edit'. This runs 100% counter to what makes wikipedia useful and great. There are already cabals within wikipedia and this will just hand more power to certain POVs. Will only work against casual vandalism anyway. Terrible idea. Slippery slope. Brianrusso (talk) 08:11, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
255. Oppose Wizzy…☎ 17:09, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
256. Vehemently Oppose The essence of how Wikipedia works is constant revision. Those things that are good perpetuate themselves, those things that don't work as well self destruct. There are lots of things in Wikipedia that don't work, or don't work well, but the less interference there is with the freedom to learn the process whereby they change to become bettet, the better the encyclopedia will eventually become. Rktect (talk) 17:50, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
257. Strong Oppose Completely contradicts what Wikipedia's all about. Wikitannica here we come. Voyaging^(talk) 18:05, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
258. Strongly Oppose - against spirit of Wiki - and unworkable as the whole project will stagnate without throusands of editors spending time revieweing others' work. Jezhotwells (talk) 18:45, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
259. Oppose This is against the key concept of a Wiki, would deter new editors, and will create an unnecessary backlog. While I am not completely opposed to a trial run (everything deserves a chance, right?), the current proposal's scope is far too broad, encompassing the mainspace and the portal namespace. What is an acceptable sample would be a small (relatively) group of BLPs or semi-protected articles. Some great ideas (e.g. Flagged protections, but this one isn't too great. --Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 00:29, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
260. Strongly Oppose as is It should only be used in place of semi-protect. It discourages anonymous users from editing low traffic pages. Also, it decreases the urgency of keeping articles free of crap and gives a false sense of security. Mike92591 (talk) 02:55, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
261. Oppose Editing Wikipedia is already too intimidating for the occasional or novice editor. There many things to learn, the process looks more and more complicated, and experienced editors and groups of editors demolish edits of the less experienced because of said inexperience, or worse because they offer a different point of view. These editors mistake not knowing the ways of Wikipedia as not knowing the subject of the article, or just think they "own" an article. This results in turning-off perfectly knowledgable editors and articles with severe POV problems. These are far more important problems than vandalism, even for BLP. Flagged revisions will just make matters worse. We can find another way to deal with vandalism. Diderot's dreams (talk) 02:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
262. Changed from support, the proposed trials are too broad and the system too heavyweight. Would rather have a lightweight system like WP:FLP. Mr.Z-man 03:28, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
263. Oppose - Although I am a vandal fighter myself, and I deal in many disruptive sockpuppet cases, this is a bad idea, if anything, it would only increase our workload to levels that would make editing the encyclopedia all but impossible.— Dædαlus ^Contribs 06:27, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
264. Another STRONG Oppose. I'm also a vandal fighter (see I'm in good company here) and I do not feel that this is a necessary action. I do Recent Changes Patrol, and even with a fast internet connection and the help of vandal fighting scripts I still frequently find myself beat to the punch of reverting the vandalism by a bot or another user -- within seconds of the vandalism going up. I also want to repeat what a few people have said -- there is no way that this discussion is going to end with fair consensus to approve the changes. FaerieInGrey (talk) 10:41, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
265. Very Strong Oppose. This contradicts the very values that Wikipedia was founded upon. What happened to "anyone can edit?" This would drive away many valuable contributors (Including myself), lead to unprecedented amounts of Ownership of articles, and in a wiki of this size, be unmaintainable, as the backlog for approval would stretch out for months. tl;dr this is a terrible idea. Firestorm (talk) 15:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

     Follow-up. Also, this currently seems to have roughly 59% support. Please keep in mind that this is not a direct vote, but rather a means to gain consensus. If this is implemented with so small a majority supporting, it will be clearly against policy, since there is not currently a consensus. Making this huge a change without the strong support of the community is a Very Bad Thing, and will drive away many valued contributors. Firestorm (talk) 16:12, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

266. Oppose, unless we start a side project where we *don't* do this called Nupedia. -Haikon 21:11, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
267. Oppose, for the many reasons given above. Deters new contributions. Aibara (talk) 21:13, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
268. Oppose. It didn't take long for censorship to come to Wikipedia. (They never call it censorship.) Perhaps the project will fork, producing one called something like "FreeWikipedia". When I search for a term on an internet search engine, Wikipedia is often the top site returned, suggesting that our community is working just fine. I would rather suffer with some vandalism than have the thrill of "be bold" taken away. I also think that it is improper for the German Wikipedia to impose restrictions on its users; the rules for using Wikipedia should be universal.--Christopher King (talk) 21:38, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

     Woah, how is this even remotely censorship? As it stands now, anyone can revert anyone's edit, this isn't that much different. As for the German WP, well for starters it's not JUST them that's been using it, and from all I gather, each WP has its own rules and guidelines, because (obviously) different people edit them(German WP also doesn't allow fair use at all, last I read, for instance). ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 22:00, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

     Its a very slippery slope, that's why ity makes sense. It would be ridiculously easy for Ownership of articles and for people to just not approve edits that conflict with their own POV. Firestorm (talk) 22:17, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

269. Strongly Oppose, for the many reasons given above. Deters new contributions. Circumspice (talk) 03:24, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
270. Strongly oppose It just seems to go against what wikipedia is. How hard is it to change back a page that has been "damaged"? Whenever I see vandalism, it has been reverted in a matter of minutes. This puts control in the hands of the few.speednat (talk) 04:05, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
271. Strongest Oppose Ever This will be a defining moment in the history of Wikipedia. If this is pushed through by the administrators and oversighters that by majority want this done, Wikipedia will have become a complete failure. This project has slowly become a place of haves and have-nots, and putting this into action will destroy this site. Wikipedia was a fine idea, but now we have too many big heads with big egos and big mops trying to take a great big dump on everything this project was supposed to stand for. Vodello (talk) 04:47, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
272. Oppose My huge worry about this system is that it will put people off dipping in and making edits, which is WP's HUGE HUGE strength. Why bother making an edit, most likely an improvement or correction, if someone else has to approve it. And whatever process we use to decide who are 'approved' users, there will still inevitably be idiots who get approval rights and start gaming the system, and just using flag/sighting as another tool to bully other users, as we've all seen before. --Ged UK (talk) 11:20, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
273. Strong oppose per Royalbroil and Kww - bring in FlaggedRevs for BLPs, but absolutely not for the entire encyclopedia. Unless of course, we actually want to discourage IPs and new users from editing. EJF (talk) 13:24, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
274. Strongly Oppose per Gwern. Every time we have a "trial" it becomes permanent, and this will too per WP:CREEP. Even confining this to BLP's in the name of "protecting the children" from juvenile vandalism or whatever will either result in WP:OWNership issues and people using BLP's to WP:POVPUSH, or make certain BLPs so bland that we would not be properly serving our readers per WP:ENC. -- Kendrick7^talk 17:13, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
275. Strongly Opposewhy, oh why, oh why, does every human endeavour have to move towards a centralised model, which disempowers the workers and enpowers the few. Edmund Patrick – confer 17:55, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
276. Oppose I went back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth again on this idea for a few weeks. In the end, I'm going with oppose because I think that the nuisance of vandalism is really (and I can't believe I'm saying this) what gives us credibility to the public. That Steven Colbert can call upon the masses to add information on elephants to the 'pedia and see those changes happen in real time tells the public that "yes, you can come here, and do whatever you want". That's a good thing, because while people can do whatever they want, they can't get away with whatever they want, and this is an important distinction. We can block the vandals, but we really want everyone who is interested in being constructive to be welcomed. Making that first edit, and seeing it seconds later, is probably the defining moment that lead every one of us to join the project. Hiberniantears (talk) 19:21, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
277. Oppose. A slippery slope towards an encyclopedia only a few can edit. --Rumping (talk) 10:54, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Neutral

1. Strong Neutral I have strongly decided I cannot decide. --209.6.21.168 (talk) 04:44, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

   It is always good to be content with one's position. :)sinneed (talk) 19:03, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

2. Comment I am opposed to implementing flagged revisions in general, but not to trying to learn more about ways to improve WP. So my support or opposition would depend on stuff like how long the trial would run and which pages would be affected. Politizer ^talk/_contribs 14:02, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

   These are things that we're actively discussing at WP:FLR/P. Your comments there would be very much appreciated. Remember that this proposal is only "part 1 of 2": we still need to have a full discussion and a similar consensus-building exercise for each separate trial, so if there is a particular bit of "stuff" that you don't like, you can voice opposition to that individually without having to oppose the entire process, which sounds to me like what you're saying. You can support the principle of a trial process here, but oppose individual trials if you think they are poorly designed or will be damaging. Or, even better, you can get involved with the development process of the trials and help ensure that they're well-designed and effective to start with. Happy‑melon 16:21, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

3. --cremepuff222 (talk) 02:02, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
4. See comment on my oppose. The Helpful One 17:13, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
5. Neutral - ok for trial but might be more useful to flag editors or generate reputation indices based on user networks. Shyamal (talk) 13:54, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
6. Relcutant Neutral. There is far, far, far too much discussion here for me to wade through in any reasonable length of time. Unfortunately, policy discussion on Wikipedia is increasingly limited to those who have sufficient free time to actually read megabytes of discussion. Powers ^T 16:23, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

   Strongly Agree. Now theres a thought I can instantly agree with :) Now whats the point of a straw poll if most of the people you are polling are not adequately engaged enough to properly understand the subject in question? Miscreant (talk) 20:43, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

7. Because I haven't been active in the last year, I cannot say whether flagged revisions are fine or not, nor I can support one side without having studied this more deeply. However, I believe a huge backlog will be created, slowing Wikipedia down. With the current system, an IP can revert a change immediately. We grew because of anonymous editors, we cannot now just dismiss their changes because they may vandalize. We would have required login for edition if this were the case. -- ReyBrujo (talk) 16:40, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
8. Neutral. I don't see anything wrong with it, but I won't lose sleep over it if it isn't passed. TopGearFreak 21:34, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
9. Neutral - I am pretty split. Although implementing Flagged revisions would be a great thing to end the constant vandalism, I can't help but think that this goes against the foundations of Wikipedia. -Marcusmax(speak) 03:10, 14 January 2009 (UTC)