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Context: Wikipedia:Flagged revisions (general information page), Poll for all articles, Poll for BLPs, Poll for some trial, Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions (implementation accepted for trial - poll, awaiting implementation)

I'd like us to conduct a poll from now until Saturday, regarding whether we should ask the Foundation to simply turn on flagged revs in the form that the Germans use it, until such time as they finish the version we've reached consensus on here, but which is constantly delayed.

Please just leave it here rather than turning it into a formal RfC or request — this is just a poll to gauge how we feel about it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:24, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: Poll is closed now. I'll be sifting through the results this weekend and doing a new poll next week to refine my and our understanding of where we all stand on this.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:39, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Polling

[edit]
The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
  • Support, however we lack any policy or guideline for assigning the reviewer status that would suit the unmodifed FR. That would require addressing before it goes live, otherwise we'll be essentially stuck with changes nobody but admins can approve. MLauba (talk) 11:49, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I've put links to this poll at a number of high visibility places, to get maximal input. Fram (talk) 12:22, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is working on DEWP and ENNEWS. Bring flagged revs here! Surely we can sort out the sighting rights in a timely manner. Perhaps even as simple as making it a part of the rollbackers, autoreviewer, bot, and sysop groups' rights as they would be the ones most likely to have use for sighting. The DEWP reviewer right is a similar concept to the ENWP rollback right. delirious & lost ☯ ~hugs~ 12:24, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Wikipedia is the result of no longer waiting for Nupedia to get its act together. Go for it. Paradoctor (talk) 12:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, it really is time to take the next step in building our credibility as a resource. Guy (Help!) 12:36, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Way overdue. Support ++Lar: t/c 12:40, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Definitely yes. Pmlineditor ∞ 12:45, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Would rather Jimbo just ruled by fiat in this situation. Way overdue support GTD 12:45, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, and a hear hear to Guy. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:48, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • AIUI, this means effectively that all pages will be protected (at somewhere between semi-protection and full protection), and a new gimmicky tool will be introduced for excluded editors so that it still feels as if Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit™, even though it won't be. No particular objections from me to trying it out as an experiment, but I think a change as major as this needs proper considered discussion instead of five days of mindless polling. (And heads should roll at the foundation for their utter failure to get the agreed version running.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:53, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - waaaay past time. Just enable it already, we'll sort out the details as things go. It's not rocket science - Alison ❤ 12:54, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support as all those above me have argued. We need it. Ucucha 12:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Please. Hal peridol (talk) 12:58, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't think this poll matters either way, except to make this already decided decision look like it has consensus, but oppose. It will hurt user retention. I have seen the way it is used on other wikiprojects, and it really ruins the wikipedia experience of instant changes being seen. Based on the way that many veteran editors consistently disregarded our rules, I don't trust the majority of veteran editors one bit to be impartial in which revisions they will choose to accept. Okip
  • Support flagged revisions immediately. The stalling and obfuscation has risen to absurd levels. This poll is unnecessary. Just do it already.Bali ultimate (talk) 13:10, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Having a long list of supports here from the usual band of vested contributors will frankly mean nothing in terms of what's good for the English Wikipedia. It is not those people who wrote or expanded the majority of articles, or even revert the most vandalism or BLP vios. If you want to turn over the building and maintaining of the pedia to these people, and arguably with the recent endorsement of the BLP vandalism spree you do, ripping up the idea that adminship is no big deal, then FR is the perfect tool to do this and create a three tier pedia. If however, you want Wikipedia's article count to continue to grow (it is not finished by a long shot, and what we do have is mostly shit), and continue to have new editors registering because they want to, not because they have to, then do not implement German FR here. Thats before we even talk about backlogs, or the very real fact that even with FR, Wikinews lets BLP violations through, with their 'sighted status' meaning they remain forever, and ludicrously, cannot even be fixed by non-vested contributors. And as we see, Wikinews is a total failure at recruiting new editors, FR is no doubt a huge part of that. MickMacNee (talk) 13:11, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    And the idea it would ever get turned off when the trial config is ready, is surely an insult to people's intelligence. The vested contributors are only interested in a wedge strategy here. Short of a total technical disaster, nothing will stop them in future from hijacking this temporary adoption down the line and turning it into a permanent feature. MickMacNee (talk) 13:41, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Will improve WP a lot. Wikinews uses drafts (similar to flagged revs), and its successful. ManishEarthTalk • Stalk 13:13, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikinews is a disaster. Pretty much nobody contributes to it, its level of output is pitifull for a supposed news service. Even with highly experienced reviewers, I have personaly seen BLP violations get 'sighted' and passed as front page news, and I eventualy gave up on that project because it was frankly too onerous to go around begging for your revert of BLP vandalism to get sighted, let alone get anything else reviewed or approved. And that is a project that supposedly runs to deadlines. Wikinews is a perfect example of the unscaleability of FR actually — its technology is seen as 'successful' on a tiny and frankly insignificant scale, yet if Wikinews handled the amount of new news articles that Wikipedia gets, it would fall flat on its face. MickMacNee (talk) 13:23, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    In that case, I change my vote to Oppose. FR will impede the improvement of small articles, and will also become a BIG BOTTLENECK.ManishEarthTalk • Stalk 07:52, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Echoing Bali ultimate's frustrations. Show, meet road. Vyvyan Basterd (talk) 13:17, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Can we expect any actual arguments in favour of this proposal, instead of just "isn't this a marvellous idea"? Have the effects of the German experiment been studied?--Kotniski (talk) 13:18, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, full FR prevents new articles with copyvios from being displayed in the first place, and can help with limiting the amount of copyright violations introduced later in an article's history. Which is the aspect that our special requirements don't address, due to the exclusive focus on BLPs. MLauba (talk) 13:25, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
How much has the Foundation paid out in the past year on copyright violation suits?--Kotniski (talk) 13:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
How much has it paid on libel suits? Nice strawman. The legal obligations in order to keep the Foundations' safe harbour provision under the DMCA is essentially identical between BLP and copyvio issues. MLauba (talk) 14:12, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You're not stupid, Kotniski, you know perfectly well that the Foundation has no legal exposure to copyright law just as it has no exposure to libel. Are you saying that the facts that hosting copyright violations is encyclopedically unprofessional and morally wrong should be ignored because you can't put a dollar sign in front of them? Is that really what you're saying? Happy‑melon 14:30, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not saying anything; I'm trying to learn the facts before making a decision. (But what's the point, since everyone else is just piling on the votes without thinking.) Clearly copyvios (and libels) are a bad thing, but are they that much of a bad thing that we have to tear down our whole editing model because of them?--Kotniski (talk) 14:38, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Some specific notes: (1) Full FlaggedRevs won't prevent the creation of a copyvio article — flagged revs start working only when the article has been flagged for the first time. (2) If an edit introduces a copyvio, it'll stay in the history if not deleted, regardless of flaggedrevs, it just won't be displayed to readers if flaggedrevs is active and not flagged. (3) The scope of the consensual implementation (WP:FPPR) is in no way limited to BLPs. Cenarium (talk) 14:32, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
For Wikimedia's developers, alphabetical order is hard. So basically, yes.--Kotniski (talk) 13:50, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well I don't see why it would be hard to make the software auto-approve all edits made to articles not in that category. Clunky, perhaps, but surely easy. Rd232 talk 17:39, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That suggestion might encourage people to miscategorise articles. Yaris678 (talk) 11:54, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I smell a Great Idea cooking over here, this would be a great way to make it happen! Something that I would support. @yaris, miscategorising would likely be an issue for new BLP articles I would think, as removal of the cat would have to be approved - this is a workable solution. Outback the koala (talk) 08:40, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as it would be impractical to review the large number of edits, and an excessive solution to a limited problem. A consensus to abandon our position as the encyclopedia anyone can edit requires wider and longer debate. Certes (talk) 13:44, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • If anything it will be better for that goal than the current system where semiprotection, rangeblocks and full protection are widespread. Anyone will be able to edit, and their edits will go in if they check out, and that will possibly allow us to re-enable anonymous editing of articles like George W. Bush (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). Most of the opposition here seems to be founded on the idea that this will somehow restrict editing to a clique. No, it won't. It will make it much easier for us to manage risk and policy without having to continually bite newbies as part of fighting the vandals off. Guy (Help!) 14:13, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • You're perfectly right about that example. I would support FR to replace existing protection (as long as one technical issue is resolved), but this proposal seems to extend to currently unprotected articles too. Certes (talk) 01:32, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The people voting "support", basically. (Well, admins and people trusted by admins.)--Kotniski (talk) 13:54, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt it. We are working on the 'us' and 'them' model now after the BLP deletion spree. The same chumps that had to source perfectly valid BLPs under threat of unchecked deletion, will be the same chumps who will have to review people's perfeclty valid additions quick enough so that the contributor doesn't turn their back on Wikipedia for good. In both cases, less articles and less editors is seen as a good thing by the camp that doesn't want to be bothered with sourcing/reviewing changes they didn't create personaly, as, in the true tradition of the vested contributor, if they didn't do it, it isn't worth shit. MickMacNee (talk) 14:14, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The guideline -- and practice -- on the German Wikipedia is that people qualify as sighters once they have made 200 article edits and have had a registered user account for 60 days. --JN466 19:46, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Let's not get paranoid.--Kotniski (talk) 14:45, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Jimbo's talk page has a certain culture all its own, and hosting this poll here, with no evidence that Jimbo intended to advertise for wider input argues that this poll was intended for that certain sub-culture, and not the Wikipedia community as a whole. I tend to agree with Okip that this little dog and pony show exists mainly to give the appearance of seeking consensus before implementing what Jimbo has already chosen to do. Reso lute 14:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment where is there some statistics about activity on the German wikipedia before this and a couple of months after and now? I would like to know exactly what it does to the workload of the anti vandalism patrol and what it did to productive contributions and has anybody done a study of other aspects that would be of interest. How am I supposed to make an informed decision if I'm ignorant and p.s. I think the wisdom of the crowds can be wildly out for decisions like this. Dmcq (talk) 14:39, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    My thoughts exactly.--Kotniski (talk) 14:45, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support ⇦REDVERS⇨ Say NO to Commons bullying 14:44, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support but come on, didn't we just do this? The one that gained over 150 supports, remember? Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 15:01, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Most of which were for FPPR, if you actually read that petition and its talk page. Not to mention the Jimbo quote at the top referred to FPPR aswell. Until now, full adoption of German FR has had sod all support in any of the venues where FR on en has actually been properly discussed (as opposed to petitioned/polled). Jimbo was told repeatedly at the time it was pointless calling the original poll to 'have a trial, any trial', as a consensus, without specific configs, because that barely 60% 'support' was full of total contradictions and self-evident half assed understanding of both FR and the wikipedia model, but he flat out went and did it anyway, leading to the inevitable result of the lame duck FPPR config, and when that failed to arrive, now bizarely, this total U-Turn into 'temporary' full FR. MickMacNee (talk) 15:20, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The encyclopedia that anyone can edit???. Mo ainm ~Talk 15:05, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I'm not opposed to flagged revisions, but I am very, very concerned with the attitude of many supporters of "Implement now and fix later." The question I have, is if we do have consensus for a flavour of FR as Jimbo indicates, why is pressure not being put on the devs to make it happen? Why are we instead looking at "temporarily" (hah!) using the German model? Quite the opposite. Once this fait acompli is past, the pressure on the devs to change the system will simply disappear and a solution against the wider consensus will become permanent. Also, I would very much like to see the supporters address the very real concerns raised about the impact blanket FR would have on the project. I, for one, am not here to serve as a moderator for every edit that is made. I am here to write an encyclopedia. FR as a tactical solution to trouble areas (such as contentious BLPs) is a brilliant idea. FR as a blunt object wielded against a project with 3 million articles without any real understanding of who is going to maintain this system is likely to result in disaster. Be careful what you wish for... Reso lute 15:07, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose there was not consensus to do this, except in a controlled way for BLP--this is not a rational response, just a frustration at the slowness of development. "let's do anything" is not the way to make progress. It corresponds to the proposal to delete all BLPs that happen to be unsourced at the moment--it sounded attractive, and had initial support, but then people started to think, and realized that most of them were articles that could be easily fixed, not deleted. In practice, the great appeal of Wikipedia to new contributors is seeing the work immediately visible to themselves and everybody. It may different for other countries, but certainly not at least for the contributors in the US to the enWP. The proof that this is a bad idea, is that people are voting for it without knowing the details. DGG ( talk ) 15:09, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - For now. Implementing it now and fixing it later is not a good idea. There are some concerns with flagged revs, mainly going against "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Flagged revisions should only be applied to BLPs when needed. I also think that flagged revisions would be an excellent replacement for semi-protection, as it provides means to eliminate vandalism and let legit editors make their edits. That would actually extend editing to more users. However, as I said, "implement now and fix later" is not the best idea. Inferno, Lord of Penguins 15:22, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Oppose This mentallity of "implement it now, and fix it later" is not the way to go with this. There wasn't really a consensus to do it this way, and this will create a very large backlog that will be only be cleared if everyone diverts their attention from building articles to patrolling these edits, which will obviously be detrimental. The Thing // Talk // Contribs 15:25, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - We have consensus for a specific implementation, and we should not deviate from that, no matter how temporarily. While I will assume good faith about the motives of others, I suspect that once full flagged revisions is turned on, it will become very difficult to scale back down to the agreed upon implementation.--Danaman5 (talk) 15:29, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose: First of all, its not clear to me what this proposal will actually do, I had to base it on the back and forth that Colonel Warden had above with others. The parameters of such a big proposal are critical. It sounds like a massive change, and not applying only to the unsourced BLPs which seem to be driving it. And as keeps getting raised by new entrants to the discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people, the unsourced BLP "problem" itself is never proven to exist. BLPs sourced or otherwise are equally subject to vandalism, but 99%+ of BLPs are fine.--Milowent (talk) 15:31, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose A) bad idea that will greatly harm, not help, Wikipedia. B) Dislike this process (where the poll is, etc., C) So contrary to the founding idea of Wikipedia as to be obviously unacceptable. D) not needed. Hobit (talk) 15:33, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support. Long overdue; a simple measure that provides a reasonable compromise between open editing and preventing damaging misinformation appearing. Other wikis have implemented it; a lot of people are now familiar with the system, and I see no reason why enwiki should be unable to cope. Sam Blacketer (talk) 15:42, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Per Sjakkalle this seems like a big issue with WP:BITE — if it takes hours or days or weeks for anyone to approve an anonymous revision, how will anons feel like they can actually edit the encyclopedia? And doing this via a poll on some individual user's talk page (no matter who) is just bad process. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:45, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. This poll was advertised at VP, which one might think was intended to draw it to the attention of as wide an audience as possible. But a quick look at the pages linked t the top doesn't disclose any clear & visibly positioned explanation of what is actually being polled about here. Peter jackson (talk) 15:48, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. "Flagged revisions the way the German Wikipedia does it" includes constant backlogs, and we're three times as large. Such backlogs effectively prevent us from fulfilling "anyone can edit" - granted, as a matter of practicality, we have to fall short of that promise sometimes in any case. The most important point remains, though: flagged revisions — any flagged revision system — would be harmful to our articles, because it wouldn't allow casual, immediate vandalism fixes by our readers, preferring to display the vandalized version even though we have the capacity not to do so. Flagged revisions with a guaranteed backlog means that such vandalism would be far more likely to slip through. Also, any flagged revision system would make it easier to WP:OWN low-traffic articles; on BLPs, agenda-driven article ownership often translates to an insistence that the article must "expose" what a horrible person its subject is. Flagged revisions seem like a magical panacea if you consider only the positive effects — so would anything else — but on balance they would harm the encyclopedia, especially including BLPs. There's a "least bad" proposal at Wikipedia:Targeted flagging that would use flagged revisions only for unwatched BLPS; anything bigger would be harmful, and this is a lot bigger. — Gavia immer (talk) 15:56, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The community approved a trial of something different. If we had wanted a trial of Germany's process we would have gotten it already. Now clearly that is all subject to change, and there is a strong amount of support above for implementing their process now, but it seems weird to approve an indefinite system we don't want when we only actually asked for a limited test of a service we did. I'm slightly less opposed if the idea is "Hey, let's see what happens for 30/60 days" but I simply don't support turning on a service we explicitly turned down for an undetermined amount of time. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 15:56, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. It's a 4 day poll to reach a conclusion of whether to ask the Foundation to enact a site-global change affecting every page. The fact it was brought up on a user talkpage linked to a subpage under that userspace along with "this is just a poll to gauge how we feel about it", leaves me unimpressed. You make clear this was a deliberate choice over bringing it up on a community discussion page, i.e. the Village Pump. So what "we" refers to, isn't clear. It includes those who happen to watchlist your talkpage. I know I don't. –Whitehorse1 15:57, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose for now, as a premature and too-limited poll, that indeed should have a far wider input. The simple paragraph and question that begin this poll are themselves left far too open to interpretation by the various factions (and yes, they exist within these pages), and can be seen as either encouraging or discouraging growth of an electronic encyclopedia that has the potential for being so much more than its paperbound bretheren. , anyone can edit. As this is not Germany, and en.Wikipedia has a few more articles and a few more editors whose contributions would be affected, I'd like to see this discussion perhaps reopened at the Village Pump as an RFC and not an informal poll, so input may be gathered from a wider consensus of editors. It needs be made specifically clear just what will be affected, who will be affected, and just how this is to be interpreted and implemented. Too soon to ask, and wrong page for reaching widest consensus from those to be affected. Schmidt, MICHAEL Q. 16:00, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - One of the biggest misconceptions here seems to be that this will instantly create a backlog because every edit will need to be reviewed. This is not true. Even under the German system, edits do not have to be reviewed unless they are made to a page which has already been reviewed once. So unless people do something stupid and disruptive like run a bot to review a million pages (which would also be counter-productive, as it would defeat the purpose), it will grow at a controlled rate. As for the system we actually got consensus for about a year ago, it seems the foundation is more interested in hip development systems than actually getting work done, so who knows if we're ever going to get that. Mr. Z-man 16:05, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mr.Z-man, I don't know what you mean by a "a page which has already been reviewed once." Its clear that I'm not the only one who doesn't understand the exact parameters of the proposal.--Milowent (talk) 16:10, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • What I mean is, even if we "use" it on all pages (i.e. the German system), someone still needs to manually set the current revision of each page as flagged/reviewed before we have to start reviewing new edits to them. Immediately after it is turned on, no pages will have a flagged revision, and there will be no backlog of new edits. We won't need to start reviewing new edits until after we review the current revisions of pages. A page that has no flagged revisions (which will be every page immediately after it is turned on) works essentially the same as pages now, that is that new edits will go live immediately. If there are 100 pages that have a flagged revision, then only the new edits to those 100 pages will need review. You can see the stats for what % of pages are flagged, and what % of the flagged ones have the current version flagged on Special:ValidationStatistics on any wiki that has FR enabled - dewiki, wikinews, mediawiki.org. Mr. Z-man 19:02, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is helpful information. If the proposal was that flagged revisions would, by policy, only be implemented on unsourced BLPs or BLPs generally, that is a far different proposal.--Milowent (talk) 21:40, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
He won't without consultation. So, why are you opposing this and encouraging him at the same time?--Scott Mac (Doc) 17:33, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Fair dos, it was probably a bit pointy, so I've changed my 'oppose' to a comment. I certainly support flagged revisions but at this stage the only way I can see this happening is Jimbo, or the WMF board, declaring that they are going to do it. I don't believe that 'the community' is capable of sorting it out, and am tired of seeing round after round of petitions and counter petitions etc. He knows it's going to piss a load of people off, but if it's the right thing to do he should just do it. Quantpole (talk) 08:33, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • comment Stopgap arrangements have a disconcerting way of turning permanent. They are only justified if there is a critical gap to be stopped, and there is no evidence at all that anything critically detrimental is happening,rather than an ongoing process of slow improvement. In fact, the last proposal I saw was to apply it to only the BLP articles that are now semi-protected, to replace semi-protection--that seems a sensible way to start, with articles we know, not guess, to be problems. DGG ( talk ) 17:31, 2 March 2010 (UTC) .[reply]
  • Comment – Is there a material reason for these continual delays? It seems like every major software development on Wikimedia is delayed by months, and I can't see why that should be. —Anonymous DissidentTalk 17:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Most delays are due to being short staffed. FR however has several contract developers hired specifically for it. The delays are due to the foundation management's unwillingness to set any deadlines for them. Mr. Z-man 19:02, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support if we can limit this to some subsection of pages: ideally BLP's. -- Bfigura (talk) 17:45, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • SPF-5000-strong Oppose. I've thought about it some more and strongly oppose because (a) we went through a lengthy process deciding what the community wanted; doing something substantially more dramatic and dangerous as a stopgap is so ludicrous that it should not be seriously contemplated whilst consuming hot beverages. (b) the risks from German-style FR in terms of bad publicity and losing editors are massive. The risks from a limited scale version are bad enough, but it was decided it was worth it. (c) the delays are basically due to the Foundation not sorting out the necessary software adjustments from the software already available. Either they care enough to sort it out, or they don't. Somebody in charge might like to light a fire somewhere... who would possibly have the clout for that?? In any case, this poll and the idea it's about are way off base; and only the thought that it's a renewed attempt to show we still care and justify spending more money on it contains my disappointment with it. PS I support it for BLPs, but even there a slow rollout starting with semi-protected BLPs makes sense, rather than jumping in with both feet. Rd232 talk 17:48, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Change as massive as this one should be slow and properly evaluated. Not knowing who the reviewers will be (and we would need lots of them) doesn't help either. The “let's try this and fix problems later” approach might be good for small projects, but not for something the size of enwiki. Svick (talk) 18:02, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose though I support this change in principle, at least for BLPs, I oppose doing it this way, especially coming so soon after January's deletionism spree. I would be reassured if there were; Metrics from DE wiki indicating that after the initial difficulties it worked well and didn't lose many editors; A clear consensus to implement this on EN wiki, and a month beforehand to appoint reviewers/extra admins. Otherwise I foresee disruption and possibly a trainwreck, Ϣere SpielChequers 18:03, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do it - for the love of everything sacred and holy. Anyone who thinks this would be biting newbies has never spent any time in the depths of new page patrol/recent changes patrol. WilyD 18:09, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose sorry, but matters need to be more fully discussed before we make a change like this, although we may have consensus for a specific version of flagged revs, this new idea (using flagged revs it in the same manner as the German wikipedia) should not be implemented on the result of a poll, just wait until the agreed upon version is completed or start a proper discussion on this new proposal. SpitfireTally-ho! 18:21, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose for now I'm worried it will decrease new editor participation out of proportion with the amount of vandalism fighting it reduces. --Falcorian (talk) 18:23, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Any implementation of Flagged Revs is better than what we have now, which is nothing to prevent blatant BLP violations all over the place. The system on the German Wikipedia has been shown to work, and will be an excellent stopgap solution until an en-wiki customized version is rolled out. BLPs are too sensitive to continue to leave wide open like we have been doing, and what many people on en-wiki fail to see is that if this system doesn't work, we can simply turn it back off. Ioeth (talk contribs twinkle friendly) 18:27, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Conditional support I've user FR on en-Wikinews ever since I joined; provided that reviewer rights are given and removed as easily as they are given as say for rollbacker then yes, if it is just for administrators, then no, as they will never cope with the workload. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 18:54, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Unless you want the whole thing to be a disaster. Opening up a German Wikipedia-like implementation (even for a trial or 'in the mean time') will result in an incommensurable mess and threaten any future implementation. Not only because of backlogs, but because if we want to be sucessful, we need to propose an implementation that will be as consensual as possible, which has never been the case of German Wikipedia-like FlaggedRevs, and still not to day. Why is it so important for the implementation to be massively supported, you'll ask ? Because we'll need a huge number of reviewers to review revisions, this is vital to the system, and if users don't like the implementation, they just won't review, or not as much as we need. So a large consensus is needed for any FlaggedRevs implementation to be successful; it's the case for WP:FPPR, but not for a de.wp-like. I'm certainly disappointed by the length of time it takes to implement the implemnetation we requested though (WP:FPPR); on that subject, this foundation-l discussion should probably be mentioned. It'll almost be a year since we've requested implementation (April 2009)... But, you should note that according to William Pietri (responsible of the deployment), the implementation delays are mostly due to user interface/workflow issues specific to implementing here on the English Wikipedia. Most of the specificities of the implementation itself which make it different from the German implementation have been coded long ago, for flagged protection in any case — see the test website. So asking developers who are in short supply to enable German-like FlaggedRevs now will most certainly not speed up the FPPR implementation, and there's no guarantee whatsoever it will be any faster to implement a de.wp-like one — because they'd to start the work all over again. We've managed to get a consensual implementation, let's stick to that one, and that the WMF gives higher priority to its implementation. Cenarium (talk) 18:58, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Foundation owns this website. The anonymous people like "User:EditorOfWikipedia" does not. If we hemorrhage even 25% of the user base because of this, which is absurdly unlikely, that's fine. More will take their place. The obstructionists and conservatives are a detriment in any event, and their loss will not be felt in 2-3 years. Will we lose a quality worthwhile writer or two. Probably. But who cares? Online communities by their nature are meant to change or die, like real communities. Stagnation is the enemy. Perfect is the enemy of good. Or would you all rather wait until the wrong person is pissed off enough to launch a proper rather than half-assed legal challenge against the Foundation that takes away the site completely?
Do you want your legacy to be the site that flamed out because of lawsuits, the site that petered out, or the site that in 20+ years is still quietly trucking along with flagged revisions? Jim, tell Sue to just pull the plug already and quit dicking about on the opinions of random anonymous people that are endangering the whole website. This isn't a popularity or ego contest. Before anyone gives me any shit over this post, I'd been fighting for and about this longer than some of your sock accounts from BEFORE the ones you're currently posting on were even registered. GoneAwayNowAndRetired 18:47, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, us huns are going to eat you. Paradoctor (talk) 19:27, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. It works fine on de:WP. I don't see what all the fuss is about. --JN466 19:33, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Jimbo, this would have a lot more credibility if it was accompanied by your resignation from the WMF board of trustees. If the team can't execute, then execute the team, don't stick Band-Aids on it. There's too much chance that things will go badly wrong or get hijacked by the policymakers at Wikipedia Review. Much as I support the idea of trying FR out in whatever form, it needs to be done carefully, not by "let's do it next Saturday". Lay out an actual plan and let's have a look at it. Franamax (talk) 19:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose- this is supposed to be the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Reyk YO! 19:44, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Per Hobit and Certes' reasoning. Would support Sole Soul's idea however. Outback the koala (talk) 19:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Too much room for abuse. New users should be encouraged to participated, not have a waiting list for every action. Everything would take twice as long to do with every action needing approval. Dream Focus 20:02, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. I don't feel like redundancy, so I'll give short summaries of some choice issues and point to some previous comments that look at this in more depth. Issues: "anyone can edit" founding principle is harmed, potential for massive backlog (if not managed correctly), doesn't actually make libellous revisions totally invisible, likely massive bad press as the MSM will announce that we're closed to edits, will delay good, planned version, could be used as a "wedge strategy" to promote long-term use of the immediately-used system, involves confusingly changing the system twice, will involve crappy old UI until the new system's UI is implemented, will result in lots of articles already being flagged when the new system is implemented (this is bad because the two systems have different approaches to flagging), involves changing the criteria for being able to flag pages significantly over time (FPPR can afford a higher threshold for flagging because flagging is lower-priority there), and so on and so forth. If you share my views, feel free to append issues to my issue list (this is a wiki!), but please colour your additions green to distinguish them from my originals. Choice comments to read above include MickMacNee, DGG, and Cenarium. FlaggedRevs is a good—and powerful—tool in the long run, but it's dangerous to the dynamic of a healthy wiki if we don't use it appropriately. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 20:03, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. This poll has been in existence for less than 10 hours and has already accumulated more the 100 responses. By my rough count and ignoring comments, roughly 20 to 35 percent oppose turning on flagged revs in the German form. This is for your information only. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 20:07, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I am counting more oppose !votes then support !votes at the moment, maybe a 60/40 split.--Milowent (talk) 20:50, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I had to bring Tom Hanks back from the dead last week. This is needed badly. --Stani Stani  20:14, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment.I am completely baffled by this poll at this stage. Hasn't someone been in touch with whoever is looking into this for the foundation. Jimbo, couldn't you have just picked up the phone and spoken to them and given everyone an update rather than this? Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:16, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I presume this was spurred by the current discussion on foundation-l where the people in charge of FR have basically said that they have no idea when it will be done, and have no intention of setting any deadlines for themselves. Mr. Z-man 20:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I do not fully understand what "German version" is right now (there are many details that are not specified). If there is a (strong) desire to turn something on immediately there is an old proposal that was discussed and sort of approved before. Ruslik_Zero 20:16, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. We shouldn't rush into this because the devs are too incompetent/lazy/under resourced to implement the proper version of FR that was agreed - Dumelow (talk) 20:20, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I whole-heartedly agree. Rushing into implementing a feature that has only been released since June 2008 is irresponsible. We need to wait until 2012 at least ... maybe even 2015 just to be on the safe side. Sincerely, the United States Congress. --B (talk) 23:10, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. The delays are inexplicable.-gadfium 20:43, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. A lot of the opposition does not seem to understand that under the German settings, articles will not be flagged until they are first sighted. Sighting involved carefully reviewing the article to make sure that no defamation or serious errors will be "flagged." Unsighted articles will be entirely unaffected. Therefore, with the German settings we can start by flagging problematic articles such as BLPs on an as-needed basis. According to the earlier polls, it is not our intention to flag 100% of the articles, and we can sanction users who do not properly vet the articles that they sight—sighting is not to be done recklessly. Newly sighted articles will therefore only gradually come into existence as users find problematic pages to sight. Cool Hand Luke 21:06, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Some of the opposition is opposing because the proposal is not explained like that. If the proposal is that flagging will ONLY be used on problematic BLPs, that's a far different proposal.--Milowent (talk) 21:42, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Technically, any page could be flagged, but our policy should only encourage it with problematic articles (such as little-watched BLPs). If someone started sighting articles willy-nilly, I'm confident ArbCom would deal with it. Cool Hand Luke 22:53, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Let's just get on and see what it does. Kevin (talk) 21:19, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose a global effort due to the significant backlog it will create. Support if it will be limited to BLPs and other select articles. --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 21:21, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    (edit conflict) With reflection to Cool Hand's comments, I note that I fully understand this, but this will not prevent a backlog from appearing, potentially quickly. If a feature is able to be used, it is also able to be abused. We see this all the time in the software engineering world, and is one of the reasons C++ has such a bad rap for such a great language. --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 21:24, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Another thing people don't seem to understand is that being a "sighter" is nothing special. Under the existing system, anyone who has had a user account for two months and has made a couple of hundred bona fide contributions gets sighting rights. Thereafter, any edits they make are automatically marked "sighted", and don't need sighting by anyone else. The great majority of WP edits is made by established editors. "Sighting" applies mainly to IP edits, which are under scrutiny already. --JN466 21:41, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Unfortunately this is also a double-edged sword. Because being a sighter is nothing special, that doesn't prevent misuse of the tool. Granted, the same occurs with rollbacker rights and the right is removed on occasion, but fact of the matter is that sighting will not be perfect. I reference the WP:NPP backlog in that we already have the "autoreviewer" right. This backlog was cleared out primarily by User:Ironholds in December (with the assistance of a few others that regularly monitor NPP, including myself). Today it's back where it was before then – a major backlog with more work needed than labor is available. In the same regard, we have the autoreviewer right to help reduce this backlog, but it still remains unmanaged. I would not be surprised if the same thing happens to flagged pages if left unchecked. --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 22:13, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    It should also be obvious that socking is much less of a problem with flagged revisions. It takes 2 months and 200 good-faith contributions before an editor becomes a sighter, i.e. before their edits show up immediately in the article version that the public sees. --JN466 21:48, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I wouldn't have been in favour of the Flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal if the required timescale had been known. William Avery (talk) 21:22, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Just for clarity, this is my understanding of what I'm supporting: FR would be turned on w/ the de.wp settings 2. Reviewer right or admin bit needed to sight article 3. Only BLPs would be sighted - I understand there would be no software prohibition from doing so, but given that you have to be a trusted use to get the reveiwer right, it seems that we can AGF here 4. When (if) the version of FR designed for en.wp is ready, we switch to that. Unless the devs throw up a red flag, support. Xymmax So let it be written So let it be done 21:42, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: it seems that the proposal was insufficiently clear, and people are increasingly trying to redefine it. This poll is getting increasingly confused, and might be better terminated in favour of a discussion of what's feasible and desirable using dewp technology right now. Work out a clearly specified proposal (tech+policy) and then poll on that. Rd232 talk 22:05, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose It'll all end in tears, I know it. The WordsmithCommunicate 22:07, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ich don't zhink so. I consider the German approach to be too restrictive, and there is no consensus for it on this Wikipedia.  Sandstein  22:14, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, please. Years overdue. Jack Merridew 22:16, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Goes against the consensus of the poll. As others have said, I doubt such activation would remain "temporary". --Cybercobra (talk) 22:22, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - We really should have this for BLPs and it has been a long wait. -- Atama頭 22:23, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Way overdue. SupportMurfleMan (talk) 22:25, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support Very overdue. Thank you to Jimbo for setting up the poll. 140.247.141.199 (talk) 22:35, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose As a new editor, I would say that one of the scariest things about contributing to Wikipedia was altering articles. Anything that discourages contribution upsets the balance that keeps Wiki working effectively. It moves the bias towards established editors, which while not a bad thing in itself, would be detrimental to specialised articles which have casual contributors.ManicSpider (talk) 22:38, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Flagged revisions is so obviously the correct decision it's hardly worth discussing. There comes a point in time when the Foundation needs to make a technical or a command decision on something and just implement it and that point in time is 18 months ago. One of the (many) problems with Wikipedia is that it works via the tyranny of the heckler. In other words, even if there is an obvious conclusion that 90% of informed, unbiased observers would reach, that conclusion is irrelevant and the result is the desire of whoever yells the loudest. Wikipedia can and should implement all available technical means at its disposal to stop libel. --B (talk) 22:40, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Wikipedia ain't broke, it doesn't need fixing. The quality and prestige of the site has only risen over past years without flagged revisions; the change only stands to damage the project. - DustFormsWords (talk) 22:42, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Much overdue. --InkSplotch (talk) 22:53, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - the shenanigans associated with a sudden, drastic, "temporary" (*cough*) implementation will only serve to stymie article development, confuse the great unwashed, and give a hard target to those who try and detract from Wikipedia's credibility. How serious is a consensus-based project that doesn't bother with consensus before implementing such a large scale change? //Blaxthos ( t / c ) 23:18, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Has much changed since we rejected this idea 63:167 here a year ago? Certes (talk) 23:45, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Cla68 (talk) 23:46, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support A functioning version of flagged revisions now, as is, is better than waiting for an ideal(?), custom-made version someday. I raised this proposal as a suggestion on 5 February, before the last Foundation board meeting.[1]—Finell 00:28, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose per "The encyclopedia anybody can edit" and "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy". Woogee (talk) 00:29, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support please, I've signed 3 of these polls/pettitions now. Lets get it done. Tim1357 (talk) 00:33, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. What is wrong with the present protect/umprotect policy? Protecting an article for a fortnight usually does wonders, it turns the vandals off long enough to lose interest, and it saves time. The flagging process, as I see it, will increase the backlog immensely. Dieter Simon (talk) 00:35, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Too much wharrgarbl, with little benefit. Q T C 00:38, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support if restricted to BLPs only, until we get the consensus-approved version. If you wanted to voice your disapproval to the idea, you should've done it a year ago. FR, in some form or other, already has the required consensus for implementation. If we can implement a bare-bones version technically while we wait for the custom version, that's good, but on the operational side, it should be restricted to BLP only. Sceptre (talk) 00:44, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Not convinced that we won't end up with a large backlog awaiting review, we are so much larger than the German system. Also what will be speed impact on this implementation - even now I see some slow down in page loads (in UK) during evenings when page changes (using huggle) rise much above 150 page changes per minute. I would much prefer all BLP to be semi-protected.  Ronhjones  (Talk) 00:44, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. To quote the third of Jimbo's statement of principles ""You can edit this page right now" is a core guiding check on everything that we do. We must respect this principle as sacred." It is my understanding that turning on flaggedrevs as the Germans use it would ruin that. (But then again, there's a possibility that I'm totally clueless about this, in which case ignore this comment.) --Yair rand (talk) 00:54, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • For me, flagged revisions is very much about restoring that sacred principle. Because of vandalism and other sillyness a great many popular and important english wikipedia articles are semi-protected much of the time now, and many are full protected as well. Additionally, with the volume of vandalism, the people patrolling operate in a constantly super-urgent and sloppy manner. A significant portion of my perfectly uncontroversial anonymous edits to the English Wikipedia have been reverted on the spot in this manner. Flagging would allow us to restore the balance: _Everyone_ could edit once again. Patrolling would no longer be so urgent that sloppy behaviour must be tolerated, and fewer good edits would get tossed. True— the edits of new users may not be seen instantly by anyone but tens of thousands of logged in users and themselves... yet we did okay back when the entire Wikipedia reader base was that small.
    • In any case, please don't assume that people who promote this system don't share the same values as you. I think they often do, and they see this as a useful step in promoting those values in the context of the enormous traffic the site sees today.--Gmaxwell (talk) 00:40, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - "Temporary" implementation of a system not agreed-upon by consensus is not a good idea. Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:55, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Conditional Oppose. Post full text of the proposal. Identify either a limited test area: i.e. only BLP's; or let the community draft guidelines first--when/when not, how/how not to use flagged rev, how to encourage people to stay around long enough to see their edits happen. If the second choice--implementation--is made, prepare for a massive press campaign to explain what this means, why its happening and how long it will last. That should include a mainpage link summarizing the new policy. Whatever choice is made, this decision should be limited, experimental, beta-style, minimally disruptive, buffered by guidelines and a Flagged Rev welcoming committee to anticipate and mitigate any related problems. IMO: non-BLP vandalism is a non-issue; semi-protection covers most issues already; improving the editing interface is more of a priority because it will bring in more people, and discourage unconstructive edits merely by seeming more stable. 68.82.197.202 (talk) 01:11, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose unless details as to who the reviewers are going to be are worked out. Otherwise this is like buying a box and being promised "there's a kitten in there" but not being allowed to look inside. Also 1) making admins reviewers is a horrible idea - 1a) it would give even more power to an already powerful (and often arrogant) group, 1b) it would further polarize the Wikipedia community between those who actually write an encyclopedia and those who boss them around, 1c) most admins are pretty clueless when it comes to content and this would very much require making judgement calls on content. While syspos generally have demonstrated their familiarity with Wiki policies (and politics) this requires a different kind of knowledge. Furthermore, 2) rollbackers shouldn't be privileged here either. Almost by definition rollbackers are people who are too lazy to write a proper edit summary. I've never asked for rollback rights simply because the tool is useless, encourages bad editing habits and is just a "Wiki-trophy" - don't see why they should be encouraged. Bottom line; ensure that good, knowledgeable, content creators are going to be the ones in charge of reviewing and I'm on board. But not until then.radek (talk) 01:32, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support since we can't seem to agree on anything better. Implementing it for BLPs only would be perhaps the best option, but above all let's stop arguing and actually try something. As we grow bigger and bigger, the principle of "anyone can edit" absolutely has to take second place to "do no harm" whenever they come in conflict. As we go around in circles I'm increasingly in favor of radical solutions, even as far as "delete all BLPs completely", if we can't quickly agree and try out something less drastic. Martinp (talk) 01:59, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support yes --Closedmouth (talk) 02:01, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support and I honestly have to question the motives of anyone who doesn't -- KelleyCook (talk) 02:28, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Knowing about Wikipedia and having the confidence and knowledge to edit it are two completely separate concepts. I've known about Wikipedia for many years but only started editing recently. And yes, this new system would have discouraged me. It's fine if you say you don't want to encourage new people, that you'd rather people who have been here for a while that can be "trusted", then that's fine but you may need to edit WP:Bite and WP:GOODFAITH. And to my mind, the credibility that Wikipedia has comes from the knowledge that anyone can edit it, from casual researchers to experts on the subject, and that those same people will pick up errors quickly.ManicSpider (talk) 05:18, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
To Clarify, we'd just be replacing the libel vandalism issues on BLPs with the "NPOV Wars". The later being far harder to cope with since you can't just revert to fix it. How do we decide who "OKs" things, and how is their neutrality assured? Wouldn't reverting it from that just be even more edit warring? ♪ daTheisen(talk) 06:06, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose do to a negative experience with this on the German Wikipedia and as being contrary to one of our founding principles. This is straight from Jimbo's statement of principles: "You can edit this page right now" is a core guiding check on everything that we do. We must respect this principle as sacred. In case that wasn't clear enough I'll emphasize it: we must respect this principle as sacred. As an experiment I invite anyone here to make some simple corrections/improvements to de.wiki as an IP and see how long it takes for your contributions to be accepted, if they are at all. ThemFromSpace
  • Support--Banana (talk) 05:59, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Revisions flagged the same way as the German Wikipedia? They have backlogs consistantly. This being with them having 1,028,000+ articles, and we have 6,904,464! I feel there is much more harm done in the process. I also can not emphasize this enough:
    Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. -Avicennasis @ 06:18, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Your argument is not very convincing, given that English has so many more speakers. (3x as many native speakers, and of course it's also much more popular as a foreign language, as witnessed by people like me who edit.) They have 25,000 active users, we have 160,000. We have 20 articles per active user, they have 42 articles per active user. Hans Adler 07:24, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Keegan (talk) 07:27, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Now that my connection is stable, I can supplement.
  • I am an ardent supporter of the idea of a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It's a wonderful concept, and one that I take very personally since I've been an encyclopedia geek all my life.
  • The issue at hand is one of pragmatism. We're no longer The Free Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit. We're the fifth most popular website in the world, Google didn't give us two million for no reason. We make them cash.
  • With our environmental/sociological model, we cannot sustain the level of access that we currently have. It's not that I don't personally want it, it is just that it is not feasibly possible. Period. We don't have the man power to patrol new pages save DragonflySixtySeven, let alone answer all the emails. With that said, we do a fantastic job considering we're running on volunteer resource.
  • I suppose the point is that there is a wall between theory and practice, with a door to shift in between. Sometimes we have to put something into practice that is contrary to theory, but that doesn't mean it lacks traveling between rooms. Flagged revisions is a software feature that seems contrary to theory, but does keep the theory in mind. It's up to us to make it work. Keegan (talk) 08:12, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose: I'm not very enthusiastic about flagged revisions anyway, and just jumping in with whatever the Germans are doing (especially without broad consensus) is a recipe for disaster. If we do decide to implement this hackneyed scheme, I want to see very clear failure conditions laid out: How long of a backlog are we willing to tolerate? Is a day acceptable? What about a week? I also want to see a page clearly explaining the system to editors who are unfamiliar with the process. Preferably, that page should be linked to clearly and prominently on every article. I certainly want a brief explanation of flagged revisions on the editing screen. I want a brief explanation of flagged revisions (as well as a link to the more in depth description) posted on every new account's talk page (I think someone above mentioned a flag rev welcoming committee). Buddy431 (talk) 07:32, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. We need this for BLPs. PeterSymonds (talk) 08:55, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Anna Lincoln 09:39, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose and censure Wales for attempting to avoid normal methods for discussing proposals such as this. Userspace is not the place for a poll on a major change. DuncanHill (talk) 10:21, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Unsure if flagged revisions are a step in the right direction at all, but a hasty, half-baked solution is certainly more risky than useful. Moreover, this is the wrong forum. The debate should be on one of the public noticeboards, and should have been started there. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:26, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Neutral On the one hand, this seems suspiciously reminiscent of Star Wars Episode III: Jimbo calls for emergency powers in order to unilaterally implement flagged revs, and then sends his death squads after all who oppose him as he uses those emergency powers to stage a coup and take over Wikipedia once and for all, crushing all who stand in his path. We've all seen the warning signs: "Wikipedia Forever" sounds a lot like "Thousand Year Reich" to me. On the other hand, I thought that this was going to be implemented sometime last April. It's long overdue and maybe we should surrender to the wisdom of our German counterparts. Cerebellum (talk) 10:50, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
An answer to Dmcq's question above would be appreciated as well. Without some concrete facts behind it, what are we supposed to base our votes on? I would like some statistics on how FR affects de.wiki, wikinews, wikisource, and whatever other projects use it. If we are doing this because of BLPs, I would like some statistics on how big the supposed BLP problem is and what its detrimental effects are. Cerebellum (talk) 11:09, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Turning on flagged revisions in Russian wikipedia (September 2008) did not lead to any noticeable improvement. "Reviewers"/"patrollers" did not cope with backlog. Currently, out of 500 000 articles in ruwiki 79% of the articles were reviewed at least once. It is not clear if 100% level will be reached.DonaldDuck (talk) 10:59, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Anyone can edit, backlog, and the expectation of many unforeseen problems when implementing something like this at a larger scale. Could also scare away or uninterest new contributors which is already a problem.Cptnono (talk) 11:38, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Asking one to register is hardly a burden. One is at greater risk of loosing editors due to having to deal with constant spam than loosing IP editors as they are unable to get instant live edits.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:17, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Registration is not a barrier to "anyone can edit" and does not contradict the founding principals in any way. The idea of the backlog is a non-argument at this point due to the way the system works - the system has no effect on a page until it has been reviewed at least once. My only concern is about the process for determining who is eligible to do the reviews. If it is restricted to admins, the process is unreasonable and untenable. I am confident we will create a process to grant the user right needed once the determination has been made to implement this rather than the never ending circular discussions that have gone on so far. Jim Miller See me | Touch me 14:28, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Whether it fails (which I suspect) or not, only practice can tell. NVO (talk) 15:49, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Support Seeing some of the opposers, I can't help feeling that I'm missing something, but it strikes me as a good way to keep frequently vandalised pages at clean versions. A high proportion of edits to Greek deity articles are by anons. Most of these but not all are vandals. Those of us with the articles on our watch lists are able to see when a vandal anon edit has been reverted but not when clean edits have been approved. Sighted reviews would, I hope, allow someone to see sighting on their watchlist without needing to wait for Wikipedia to bring up the edit and then return to the watchlist. I therefore see it as a potential time saver. It all depends whether the selection of sighted articles is done sensibly and manually. Those who are familiar with the page histories being best able to judge.--Peter cohen (talk) 15:50, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ja, bitte! Support..Huldra (talk) 16:00, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Stephan Schulz. causa sui (talk) 16:15, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose for usual reasons against flagged revisions (backlog, new editors having work buried, flagged version containing bad content and unflagged version removing it). Only place this would make sense are heavily edited / vandalized FAs - it would actually make sense, and FAs are in some sense "done." SnowFire (talk) 17:04, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm concerned that we would not be able to keep up with the backlog if we implemented FR on six times the number of articles that we planned to, even temporarily. But this might be a good idea, if only to gauge in advance how many articles we can reasonably have flagged protected at once with the new system. NW (Talk) 11:40, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • You don't seem to understand; Jimbo has not proposed using the German Wikipedia's policy (aspiring toward 100% flagging, which we rejected), he has just proposed using their technical settings. Under the German settings, articles are not flagged until they are first sighted. If we don't want to have flagged revisions for all articles on the site (which we don't), we simply do not sight all articles on the site! Instead, we sight the articles, such as BLPS, that may be problematic on an as-needed basis. Please read Z-Man's posts below, which accurately describe the German settings. Zero articles will be flagged when this is turned on—we only make articles flagged when the first flagged revision is sighted. Cool Hand Luke 21:12, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Indeed, I did misunderstand. Thank you for the correction Luke. NW (Talk) 02:37, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • I still don't understand what the word "sighted" means. Could someone clarify? Heimstern Läufer (talk) 03:07, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
          • Wikipedia:WikiProject_Flagged_Revisions#Implementation_in_the_German_Wikipedia explains a bit. "Sighting" an article means that you have flagged it as "OK" for public viewing. If an article has never been sighted, the newest version is shown to anonymous users by default. If the article has been sighted at least once, the most recent sighted version is shown to anonymous users, and the newest version is shown to logged-in editors. NW (Talk) 03:14, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
            • That clarifies slightly; but all it means is that flagging develops gradually in terms of number of articles affected (gradually does not necessarily mean slowly, the extent of the flagging is not agreed). If there was a way to remove flagging, the approach would be more tenable (making flag-limitation doable purely in policy; and policy could then be, for instance, to limit to BLPs). Equally, flagging has (as I understand it) a passive version, which could be turned on immediately, and would help identify stable versions of pages, which would be useful on highly-vandalised pages, and give the community some experience with how reviewing would work (assuming review rights handed out to enough people). Basically, this proposal is half-baked, and too many people are opposing it because it's half-baked (and might support something better and clearer) and too many are supporting it despite it being half-baked (because they like the general idea). Rd232 talk 08:09, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
            • Aren't they all "sighted, unreviewed and hidden" by default when fr is turned on? I can't see the rationale behind censoring a small pool of hand-tagged articles when 3 millions of them will be untagged and thus still public. NVO (talk) 16:01, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. At minimum, failure conditions must be established before-hand: i.e. measurable conditions under which it would be turned off as too problematic — and the situation monitored appropriately. Rd232 talk 12:58, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I gather that the German Wikipedia uses flagged revisions on all articles, so I am afraid I will need to buck the trend here and oppose that. (I am neutral about using it as an alternative to protection on certain articles.) It puts an enormous strain on the RC patrol to have to approve each and every revision an anonymous user makes, and it is a major turn-off for new contributors if there is a long delay in doing so. The Wikibooks project, where I have made a few edits, have at times taken weeks to get a perfectly non-controversial edit through. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:02, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Too many unanswered questions about its physical implementation. Poll is in too hard-to-find a place to get real community-wide feedback. And this would be a sweeping change in direction for a project which claims all can edit, and which claims to aim for "the sum of human knowledge". Elitism and needless restriction are the greatest dangers to a project which claims such goals, and this proposal smells of both. Dekkappai (talk) 17:10, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Very strong oppose. Unneeded bureaucracy, a lot of room for abuse, not too much vandalism to have FR. Also, Jimbo, this is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, not some caste of "trusted" editors. SkyBonTalk/Contributions 19:06, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not too much vandalism? Is there a website that gets more vandalism than the English Wikipedia? I've heard a lot of arguments against FR, but I think this is the first time I've seen "we don't have that much vandalism" as one. Mr.Z-man 22:51, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Yeah, not much. I frequently read Wikipedia and it is 1% probability chance that I am going to run into vandalized page. Therefore ruining the basic principle of Wikipedia for that rate of vandalism is a real waste. SkyBonTalk/Contributions 21:34, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • No As I understand it (using Google translate to view the page on de-wiki), this would have the effect of making every page actively review-protected, so that only users satisfying a decently long list of criteria can review a page (it seems to require > 300 edits in the article namespace, a certain tenure on Wiki, a certain number of logins, etc - I don't trust Google Translate that far). That particular proposal was emphatically and resoundingly rejected already. If there were a way to restrict this to BLPs or currently protected/semiprotected articles, I'd be in favor, but as it is, just no. RayTalk 19:12, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Has to be done. If anyone can just add anything they want instantly to articles on living people (things that are are pretty much instantly picked up and disseminated all over the web by various services even if the libellous additions are picked up quickly) then sooner or later, considering the extremely litigious nature of the US and some other county's, someone is going to sue properly. These additions have to be looked at before they go live, and it needs to be done soon, not in some far flung distant future with no timetable for when that future will be.

If it's not done then the objectors will get their instant edit fixes for a while, but sooner or later they'll get massive withdrawal symptoms due to Wikipedia being sued out of existence.Amentet (talk) 19:20, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note that Wikipedia is not liable for the contributions it hosts. It is the individual editor who has added the information who is liable. In the few cases where someone has been sued for a BLP violation, it was the editor concerned, their identity uncovered through their ISP, who got sued, not the Foundation. --JN466 20:41, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment on the above note by JN. As far as I know the non liability has never been tested in the courts by someone with the resources and inclination to sue an organisation with money rather than someone who lives in their parents basement and has no money. I think someone with the resources and inclination to properly sue would probably be inclined to sue the former. When newspaper articles are libelous in the UK then as far as I'm aware it's the publisher who is sued in the courts. Private Eye cases in their long history of being sued are referenced as Blahblah Vs Pressdram Ltd in the paperwork. I think the same holds true in the USA, unless an American lawyer would like to correct that.

So basicaly what's being gambled is that a court won't decide that Wikipedia a publisher and responsible for it's content.Amentet (talk) 21:12, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act. --JN466 22:16, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Under the US court system, it is entirely possible for a person or organization to be bankrupted by legal proceedings even if the case never makes it to trial. Just because they won't win won't necessarily mean that people won't try or that it won't hurt the foundation financially and PR-wise. Mr.Z-man 22:51, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
(e/c) NAL, but as I recall the RIAA wasn't too shy about suing people who lived in their parents basement if they could find them file-sharing. It's not an exactly analogous situation but being a small fish in the US soesn't seem to protect you against a $200,000 damage award. Franamax (talk) 22:53, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support What is the greater harm? That an IP's edits have to wait for a few moments to be reviewed, or that negative BLP information sits around for months without anyone really evaluating it? I'm more in favour of just doing this for BLP's, but something is obviously needed. Bradjamesbrown (talk) 21:18, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. I also oppose on procedural grounds; this poll should not be conducted here and should be advertised more widely. --ElKevbo (talk) 21:40, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support flagged revisions for BLPs, by whatever means is most expedient. It's wrong for us to twiddle our thumbs while BLPs get needlessly vandalized every day. *** Crotalus *** 21:52, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support: I strongly support flagged revisions. Its high time to implement this and prevent repeated vandalism by IP addresses especially in BLPs. Thanks. Radiantenergy (talk) 22:48, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support for trying it out.' - We should at least give it a try. NerdyScienceDude :) (✉ click to talk • my edits • sign) 23:11, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - I thought it was clear from Wikipedia:Flagged revisions petition (which has 261 signatures, vs. the opposing poll with 35) that the community was ready to at least try flagged revisions. The bold actions taken on BLPs over the past few weeks cleary show there is something missing from our toolset. Complaints abound about semi-protection — flagged revisions is a gentler form of harm prevention. –xenotalk 23:31, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    The petitions are not an argument, most users interpreted the poll 'for' FlaggedRevs as requesting that the WMF enables the requested consensual implementation, though it was very ambiguous since there are different ways to implement FlaggedRevs and the petition said just 'flagged revs' without specification. On the other hand, most users interpreted the petition 'opposing' FlaggedRevs as asking that the WMF does not enable the requested implementation, so there's a huge gap, it's not symmetric at all. As evidence you can see that there are many users who signed the petition for flagged revs but opposed in this poll, and on the other hand, many users who have opposed in this poll would definitely not have signed the poll opposing flagged revs because they want the requested implementation, but not a de.wp-like. Cenarium (talk) 22:27, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - there's been consensus for this, at least in trial form, for a long time. Let's give it a try and see how it goes - it could be just what we need to solve our BLP problems. Robofish (talk) 01:33, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • People can just semiprotect whatever they want/need in the meantime regardless of this outcome. Certainly more efficient than arguing over legislative when de facto something else can be achieved regardless of the rules. YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 02:23, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support - it'd still be the encyclopedia anyone can edit. It just might take a while for your edit to show up - which may be a discouraging thing for a first-time editor, but there are plenty of places on the web where submissions are, by necessity, moderated before becoming visible to all, and so as a part of the user experience this doesn't seem abnormal or unnatural, just different to what we are currently accustomed to and can no longer universally afford. Many of the objections are plain wrong, and seem not to understand that it isn't the German pedia or Wikinews system of "every page gets vetted" that is being discussed, but just the technical implementation where in principle any page could be put onto that list, but in practice only BLPs or similarly controversial pages are likely to. Thanks to CoolHandLuke for repeatedly pointing this out, but this erroneous point presently still stands unreplied to in various objections (and I can't be bothered to work through them all). The objections on the grounds of "lack of planning" and "may be difficult to reverse in practice" are rather stronger; in fairness though I think there has been adequate consideration put into this proposal (judging by CoolHandLuke's responses in particular), but it has been written in a rather haphazard way, due to its authors intended informality, that doesn't do justice to its actual workings (indeed, a longer and clearer explanation may have prevented the fallacy that this is going to involve 3 million pages put on sighting queues!). As for it being practically difficult to reverse this implementation - technically it would presumably be quite simple to do this, if it were found necessary to do so, so I presume this objection is actually based on the difficulty of finding community consensus to return to the status quo. Now I am 100% certain that if this turns out to be a disaster, such consensus would rapidly emerge - even it it was more of a perceived failure than an actual one (objections to change and cries of "catastrophe" tend to be strongest just before and just after such a major change takes place). So it's more in the intermediate case that "it's neither a cure for all ills nor an unmitigated failure, and there's some dissatisfaction but not a clear consensus about which direction to go next" that the problem of "in practice this will be hard to revert" applies. I don't see that as a major problem - neither a major gain nor loss, just a new reality that the community would no doubt readjust to, especially as new users join for whom "status quo" would mean flagged revisions and the idea of removing them may seem radical and dangerous. A key vulnerability of the wiki governance model is that a consensus system produces a natural tendency to conservatism, even when a majority of users recognize both necessity and inevitability of change. We know that FR is bound to happen, we know that it hasn't produced a cataclysm when applied to other large wikis (and our implementation here will be comparatively limited) and it is certain to produce at least some advantages. Why stall any longer? TheGrappler (talk) 03:19, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - The community has spoken and the consensus is clear. shoy (reactions) 08:29, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - implementation is taking way too long and with the devs unable/unwilling to set a time-frame, this is an acceptable alternative, especially if it is implemented as Cool Hand Luke has said. Sarah 09:29, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I'd just like to remind Jimbo Wales that POLLS ARE EVIL. Step up to the plate dude. For the love of the project, ENABLE FLAGGED REVISIONS ALREADY. We've all seen this "poll" a couple dozen times over by now. It's becoming a sad joke. JBsupreme (talk) 09:31, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - I support flagged revisions. However, Jimbo Wales doing an end run around RfC to prematurely implement a version of flagged revisions that the community hasn't reached consensus on, may easily lead to the unfortunate scenario where people are turned off by their first encounter with flagged revisions and refuse to give it the warm welcome it deserves. Let's have a little patience - we can take care of things for a few months. Dcoetzee 14:04, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't think your characterization is fair. The pool is an attempt to gauge (and potentially build) consensus. An end run would simply be issuing a directive to the tech staff to turn it on. We can use this poll as an opportunity to express our views on how important we think the behavioural differences are (e.g. I think they are important, but not critically so compared to the overall behaviour of the functionality), for example.
    • Your commentary appears to assume that the updated version will actually be coming at some point should no action be taken, but to my best ability to tell that isn't a very rational position. I can't come up with any objective evidence for forward progress in the implementation of flagged revisions, other than some claims by foundation staff of the kind which have been made for years and which were demonstratively empty promises in the prior instances. At this point I think our best chances for reaching the desired end state is to activate-early-activate-often and iterate. --Gmaxwell (talk) 18:30, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • What I primarily object to is the manner in which this poll is being conducted - on a user subpage, with an explicit request to not conduct it in the conventional public setting? It certainly doesn't promote the desired outcome. Jimbo seems to want to keep the poll "informal" but there are other ways of accomplishing that.
      • If there really have been interminable delays in the deployment of flagged revisions and there is no scheduled "release date," then I would support this proposal, while admonishing Jimbo for launching the poll in this manner. Dcoetzee 20:41, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support This is a pressing matter for some articles. If it works on the German site, why not here? Michbich (talk) 14:25, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Clearly we won't get consensus with this poll, though. Haphazard, "let's just do it!" polls are about as useful as haphazard, "let's just do it!" major configuration changes. Frustration should lead us to be irresponsible with managing this site. Let's not take something useful to hundreds of millions of people and wreck it with a hamhanded attempt to improve it. Nathan T 14:32, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose; the German implementation is significantly more sweeping than is required here and retrenching to the version already agreed upon for trial implementation here (flagged protection) would likely prove impossible. Major configuration changes should be undertaken deliberately and incrementally and flagged protection is the way to accomplish this. The BLP benefits for flagged protection are significantly greater, because the much lower # of edits requiring confirmation will allow checking the diffs for more than just obvious vandalism when sighting. Christopher Parham (talk) 16:23, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I am active on the German Wikipedia and it has really helped us stamp out the "Kilroy was here" stuff. I am a "Sichter" and use some of the cool tools that were developed. For example, in a boring meeting with Internet connection I can upload 20 flagged pages at a time, conveniently displaying the change, so I can accept or not. The hard part was getting everything looked at once, but since we only flag pages that have been flagged once, it scales. --WiseWoman (talk) 17:18, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I strongly prefer the proposed english wikipedia implementation and I think it's better than anything _I_ would have come up with... But the changes to the software are being abused to indefinitely delay the implementation and I feel that proper attention and priority will not be given to this project until its placed in the critical path. Moreover, regardless of how much development is done refining the software in advance of implementation the actual usage is going to cause the discovery of many changes and revisions, it certainly did on German Wikipedia. We might as well skip the cycle and go straight to the hard-learned practical experience. Cheers! --Gmaxwell (talk) 18:24, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The Germans are taking an average of nearly 48 hours to review each edit[3]. That is unacceptably slow. Therefore we shouldn't turn on FlaggedRevs until we can turn it on only on the pages that need it most. Hopefully we'll get used to reviewing edits and be able to turn it on everywhere later, but we shouldn't jump in at the deep end. --Tango (talk) 18:28, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Tango, we could easily operate an auto-review bot that reviews edits after N minutes, and enhance it further by suppressing this behaviour for particular articles or when the updates contain suspect words or the like. Such a bot could easily be created in an afternoon or so. The auto-review would clearly be less good than real review, but I believe it would address your time concern completely and _still_ be superior to no flagging at all. Thoughts? --Gmaxwell (talk) 18:34, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Now that I'd like to discuss more. I years ago mused on the merits of having edits not appear immediately, but appear automatically with a time delay determined by the trust the system puts in a user, which could be determined in any number of ways (delay=zero for sufficiently trusted users). The key being that an appropriate time delay gives time to review and reject edits if necessary; but it doesn't require every edit to be reviewed before going live. Time delays and other variables can be adjusted as necessary, if too many edits are going unreviewed which should not, or vice versa. Rd232 talk 19:49, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • The funny thing is that under the existing or proposed software _any_ reviewer could take the initiative to make it happen just by running a bot... No waiting on WMF's limited developer resources required. No complicated and dangerous changes to mediawiki. No hard and difficult to change policy imposed from above. Just regular users, contributing based on their own initiative and abilities, subject to the general oversight and review by the community. I think just about any formulation of this is a win (improve article review), win (improve community control), win (avoid waiting on/burdening core developers). ::shrugs:: But how to make it happen? The only way I see to make it happen would be to just adopt this proposal and then those kinds of responses could grow organically. Anything else requires us to obtain consensus based on speculation and unknown need (e.g. how aggressive does this timer need to be? We can't know unless we try), and that appears to be really hard. --Gmaxwell (talk) 21:06, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Is the German delay really comparable to that which would be expected here? Their system, as I understand it, has a target of reviewed edits to almost all pages. This clearly will increase workload and hence lag. What is being discussed here, is simply using their technical implementation, but with a different objective for the kind of system that it would be used for - mostly limited to BLPs. That's a big difference, and I think it makes the size of delays on the German wiki a moot point. (There's a secondary question of whether a delay of 24 or 48 hours is really unreasonable? On high-traffic pages, or where there is a surge of interest e.g. due to a recent new item, then "sighting" is not likely to involve a long wait, while other pages are unlikely to suffer badly from such a wait for an update to show. And indeed there's a third question of whether a system like Gmaxwell suggests for "autosighting" is a good idea - I think it would require a lot of thought, but it's clearly not a stupid idea that can be dismissed out of hand. These two points also suggest that the German "48 hour lag" shouldn't be considered an argument-ending bogeyman, but it is a useful datapoint if we were to consider at a later date a more extensive system of flagged revisions.) TheGrappler (talk) 22:00, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • As I understand it, simply from reading Jimmy's comment at the top, the proposal is to carry over the German implementation to this wiki. The default for all pages would be to show to most recently flagged revision. So I don't know what you mean by "limited to BLPs"; the ability to limit to BLPs would seem to be the en-wiki approved variant of the software on which we are waiting. Implementing the German system here would seem likely to produce similar delays. Christopher Parham (talk) 14:24, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. This is an irresponsible panic reaction to a situation caused largely by management neglect. I don't know whether this has so far been a board-level issue, but if it is not, then the board should now be asking some hard questions. Extended rationale below in the discussion section, at #A_panic_reaction_after_management_neglect. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:28, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • oppose. Consensuses is for a limited trial, and see what the results are. It makes nonsense to trial something else; the results are going to be contriversal enough as it is. Edgepedia (talk) 19:53, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, Support, Support! We should have done this a year ago. Why not go with what we have rather than waiting til kingdom come for the "perfect" solution. Kaldari (talk) 21:11, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I'd prefer to have required sign-in by editors and some sort of invisible flag system whereby the work of new editors can be checked up to the point of being vested as "trusted." Carrite (talk) 03:09, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Wait for the limited trial. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 05:10, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose except for articles that have been subject to full protection and placed on article probation. Flagging should never become a part of the normal editing cycle, because a good editor does not revert someone else's addition if only part of it is problematic. A good editor fixes only what is wrong with it, taking the time to fix grammar, find better sources, etc. The only time that flagged revisions could be useful is when Wikipedia has given up on all the normal editing tools and left it to admins only to change an article (that's already not an encyclopedia anyone can edit). Flagging should also be associated only with those articles on article probation, because if a human being is going to take the time to go over each edit for an article then there'd better be a high price for wasting his time with abuse. Wnt (talk) 05:14, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support - I know that I haven't been active for a couple months ... but this is SOOOOO way overdue. Should have been done ages ago — Ched :  ?  05:29, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support, give it a go.--Commander Keane (talk) 07:49, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Much too drastic a change for my conservative views. And I just think it's arrogant for us to have to approve another user's edits. However I would compromise by turning on some form of Flagged or Patrolled Revisions for BLP's only. -- œ™ 09:42, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose; not going to be enough reviewers to make this worthwhile; makes more users into vandal targets; net negative effect on anonymous editing. Even assuming that flagged reviewer is a userright that gives the determined vandals and Grawp's minions a way to find new targets to harass off the 'pedia. —Jeremy (v^_^v Dittobori) 09:47, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose We have consensus on the form to pursue so let's implement that. If there are technical difficulties in implementing it the let's air them and see what can be done about them. If it is a matter of human hours then many hands can make for light work, but we need to know if those hands are required. Hurriedly implementing "what the Germans have" however just to have Flagged Revision on the wiki is not the way to go. Let's do the job right the first time around, otherwise it will never get done properly. -- RA (talk) 13:27, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose For many of the reasons already stated. Dalliance (talk) 13:51, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Since it is stated very clear that it is a poll, then I don't have to refrain the word oppose on this proposal. I first edited under an IP and saw the change to the article immediately. It certainly discourages new user or casual IP editors if they have to wait for the approval process before their edits appear on the page. OhanaUnitedTalk page 18:49, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support, way overdue. Our BLPs badly need this. Please, let's give it a go and work out the details from there. JamieS93❤ 19:38, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as written. "We have to do something, this is something, therefore we have to do this" is a logical fallacy, not sound reasoning. Even if limited to BLPs, we ought to work out the details first instead of jumping into something we are not prepared for at all. Tim Song (talk) 20:05, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose;. The community has already rejected this solution, and this type of (poorly advertised, short-term) poll is not appropriate as a measure of whether consensus has changed. If the problem is that the developers are dragging their feet, then why can't the Foundation do something about that? Karanacs (talk) 20:10, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. We have already reached consensus and this shouldn't be thrown away. Nonky (talk) 22:03, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose What Karanacs said. BejinhanTalk 02:57, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Discussions

[edit]
It means that Wikipedia will be (almost) fully protected — only admins and a certain (as yet uncreated) set of other approved users will be able to edit it.--Kotniski (talk) 13:01, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That is incorrect. Flagged Revs doesn't restrict editing, it however prevents non-reviewed versions of an article from being displayed to normal users by default. They can still access the non-reviewed version by clicking on an icon however. MLauba (talk) 13:05, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
So effectively, it does restrict editing. (You can edit, but your edit won't show up — so "editing" for excluded users is effectively just the same as making an {{editprotected}} request on a fully protected page.) --Kotniski (talk) 13:09, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It means that a select few veteran editors, many editors who consistently and successfully violate policy without sanction, decide what should and should be on Wikipedia. This will cause more frustration, new editor loss, and fierce arguments because these veteran editors will have more control over content than newer editors. Okip 13:10, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I got reviewing rights on the German Wikipedia a long time ago, and I still have only 636 edits there. It's a lot less exclusive than adminship. Hans Adler 14:04, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You have made 12618 edits to the English Wikipedia. As you are German, please explain this discrepancy. Does the German environment have a discouraging effect upon you? Colonel Warden (talk) 14:21, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I don't consider this question very appropriate, but here is a complete answer: The English Wikipedia is my home wiki. I joined in November 2007, a few weeks after I moved to England and got broadband at home for the first time in my life. My original intent was to work almost exclusively on mathematics articles, on a level of specialisation at which only English articles have a sufficiently wide readership to be worth bothering with. Instead, I got sucked into this multi-player game. While I created my German account a few days after the English one to protect my user name (this was before global accounts), initially my activity on de was extremely limited [4] and wasn't very different from my general interwiki activity in other languages I can read (fr, es, it).
The German environment did have a discouraging effect on me, but the problem was most emphatically not the flagged revisions. Initially they didn't even exist yet, and once they were introduced I felt they were more of an incentive to be more active. The problem was a handful of grumpy German users who go ballistic when another German mentions the English Wikipedia. I only became a bit more active there when I happened upon a German topic here [5] and decided to develop it in German first, hoping for better input. This was very successful, with a German student scanning several important rare sources for me in a library. As a result of those activities I quickly had the 200 article space edits necessary for getting sighting + rollback rights on de. (My account was 20 months old at the time, way over the required 2 months.) Since then I have become a bit more active there, in part because I started occasional work on sighting requests (there is a page where you can ask for a sighting if you feel it takes too long), which increased my watchlist. Hans Adler 07:06, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This link seems to be the relevant one: Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions. This describes different national flavours: German, Polish and Russian. There's some confusion about terminology — is flagged exactly the same as sighted? The German version has the latter, if it matters. Anyway, the Polish version sounds the most sensible, if we were to rush this in a half-baked way, as it is implemented gradually rather than with a big bang. A sweeping change for all articles does not seem sensible when the details remain to be thrashed out. Colonel Warden (talk) 14:15, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I was originally going to cast my vote as "tepid support- I trust Mr. Wales' intentions and judgment". But I was agitated by a comment below, made by an editor whom I have met personally and respect deeply: "The proof that this is a bad idea, is that people are voting for it without knowing the details. " So I spent the last half hour trying to read all our documentation, and I have to say it's just not laid out clearly. Now, I think that a lot of the opposition to this proposal seems to be grounded in distrust, and that this distrust is fed in part by confusion. So I hope that this proposal's supporters will try to clarify the documentation. Especially, I would like WP:Flagged revisions divided into two pages, one for the extension (i.e., what do all configurations of this extension have in common?), another aggregating the specific configurations; the former page should be extremely brief, and should defer discussions of specific configurations to other pages. Andrew Gradman talk/WP:Hornbook 04:27, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Well, I support the proposal based on my experience with the system on the German Wikipedia. The system is explained in German at de:WP:Gesichtete Versionen. Unfortunately I don't have the time to translate this. By the way, I think it is allowed to wonder what the fact that people who don't know the details are voting against the system, especially when they know it has been successfully used on the second largest Wikipedia since 2008. Hans Adler 07:33, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(undent) Hopefully once the software is complete wikiprojects will be able to vote to either be included or excluded?Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:20, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No. This proposal includes all articles equally. If you think that your project needs less protection or conversely that BLPs need extra protection, then be aware that this petition applies equally to the whole of Wikipedia. ϢereSpielChequers 13:13, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question. I'm sure this is answered somewhere in one of the myriad of pages about flagged revisions, but what exactly are reviewers to be looking for when they decide whether or not to approve a page? Are they just looking to make sure it's free of obvious vandelism? Do they check for unsourced material? Do they check the quality of sources, and make sure that they say what is asserted in the article? What about copyright issues? I guess what I'm asking is, how OK must an article be to be approved (or whatever the correct term is) for general viewing? Buddy431 (talk) 16:24, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Whilst we're on the subject, was the issue of the legal liability of reviewers ever settled? WMF says it's not responsible for content, it's down to the editors. What about reviewers letting through libel? Rd232 talk 18:06, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't know about the libel aspect, but we have to be practical here. If we adopt this for all 3.1 million articles without first creating, and recruiting for a new class of "reviewers" who can be trusted to check that information is reliably sourced; and we also replace wp:verifiable with wp:verified, then you can be pretty sure that however this starts, after a week or two all Rollbackers will all be made reviewers and the only thing we will be screening for is blatant vandalism. If however we don't go down the German route but we go for a more nuanced system that targets high risk articles such as ones that are currently semi-protected and others that are contentious or vandalism targets, then we could check that which is checkable. However if we continue to allow people to add unsourced uncontentious material, but not allow such material to be marked as patrolled without the patroller sourcing it, then I fear we could only run this on a small minority of articles. ϢereSpielChequers 18:39, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Commenting on "Whilst we're on the subject, was the issue of the legal liability of reviewers ever settled? WMF says it's not responsible for content, it's down to the editors. What about reviewers letting through libel?" above. WMF may well state that they're not responsible for content as a general stated principle, however that doesn't mean that some court or other is going to agree with them on that. Combine that with some of the astronomical sums awarded for stress etc. , it's basicaly just gambling that a court might agree with that position, very high stakes gambling.Amentet (talk) 19:35, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Who gets to review edits and who gets to appoint reviewers? We currently have just over 1700 admins, though barely half are active. We also have 1200 wp:Autoreviewers and nearly 3,300 Rollbackers and as these are newer systems I suspect that most of these are active. I'm assuming that admins would appoint reviewers and all admins, Autoreviewers and possibly Rollbackers would be reviewers from the start. If we do adopt this in the rushed manner requested by this petition then I think we have to make all three groups reviewers and accept that this is only for screening out blatant vandalism, and that if a vandal alters one part of an article just before a reviewer improves another part of it, that vandalism is liable to stick. If we go for a more targeted measured approach such as introducing this for BLPs only then we could adopt the rule of only marking an edit reviewed if you've verified the source, in which case we might not want all rollbackers to be reviewers. In any event can I suggest that everyone who supports this and wants to make it work, or like me is opposed because it probably won't work, please try to make it a bit less of a trainwreck by persuading some longstanding, civil, clueful editors to run for admin; and if they are good contributors who create lots of legitimate new articles but maybe lack the clean block log, arcane policy knowledge and rampant wp:editcountitis some now expect of admins, please nominate them at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Autoreviewer. ϢereSpielChequers 21:06, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Re: if a vandal alters one part of an article just before a reviewer improves another part of it, that vandalism is liable to stick: In the German system, you always get a diff showing you the last sighted version and all changes made since then. It is that diff that you "sight". --JN466 21:15, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • OK so far so good. But what happens if an editor with reviewer status fixes a typo on an article that has unsighted changes? Does the system default to assuming they have reviewed all edits since the last sighted edit, or does it require their edit along with all other edits be sighted? ϢereSpielChequers 21:32, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • When you edit an article with unsighted changes, you get a diff display with the unsighted changes above your edit window. After you click Save, your new edit is not marked sighted; instead you get another diff display showing your change as well as any previous changes, and you have to explicitly okay all changes since the last sighted version (including your own). It's up to you whether you click on the button to mark all changes sighted, or leave it to someone else (e.g. if you're not sure about the previous edit). --JN466 21:49, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • And what happens if an established editor without reviewer status tries to fix a typo on an article that has unsighted changes? Certes (talk) 23:58, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • If we use autopromotion criteria such as the ones discussed elsewhere on this page (2 months+200 edits), there will be extremely few established users who won't have reviewer status. Mr.Z-man 01:43, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
          • And it would ruin most of the BLP benefits of the implementation, as most users with a 200 edits/2 months experience will be able to detect obvious vandalism, but not BLP violations. That's essentially why autopromotion had been rejected in prior polls (Wikipedia talk:Reviewers) - in favour of a rollback-like process, and using database reports to detect potential candidates. Cenarium (talk) 14:29, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Sighting rights in the German WP are handed out very liberally: 2 months of being a registered user and a couple of hundred bona-fide edits is all you need. If we are talking about introducing the German system, this is what it is. It is mainly directed at IP and new user/sock vandalism. --JN466 21:20, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • OK I will assume from that that this is simply about screening out blatant vandalism. If we wanted to use this to require the use of reliable sources for BLP info we would have to be a bit pickier as to who our reviewers were. ϢereSpielChequers 21:32, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • That's exactly right, and it's what the German page explicitly states:
        • It continues,
          • "Das Recht, Versionen auf diese Weise zu kennzeichnen, ist sehr einfach zu erhalten (siehe #Sichterstatus) und die Kennzeichnung erfolgt ohne großen Aufwand (siehe #Markierung einer Artikelversion als „gesichtet“)."
          • "The right to flag versions in this way is very easy to obtain (see #Sighter status) and the process of flagging is very simple (see #Marking an article version "sighted")" --JN466 22:07, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
            • Re Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act that JN linked. The article does seems to suggest that it's been open to interpretation. It might be possible that the wrong judge might stretch out the process even with that act. Also if Wikipedia as an international site is open to UK Libel law then there is no such act in place, possibly ("The laws of libel and defamation will treat a disseminator of information as having "published" material posted by a user and the onus will then be on a defendant to prove that it did not know the publication was defamatory and was not negligent in failing to know: Goldsmith v Sperrings Ltd (1977) 2 All ER 566; Vizetelly v Mudie's Select Library Ltd (1900) 2 QB 170; Emmens v Pottle & Ors (1885) 16 QBD 354;") could be interpreted by the wrong judge in context of this issue under discussion, ie. failing to implement a safeguard against libellous statements against living people even though there was one available to be implemented.

I have no idea if Wikipedia could be sued in any country other than the US though.Amentet (talk) 02:07, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • People can just semiprotect whatever article whenever the vandalism gets annoying. From my experience of checking RC on schools cats, about 80% of edits are vandalism or reverts thereof, more than BLPs. In any case, those vandalisms that stay a day or more, I just lock them, it's easy. Whether this passes or fails, slocking everything or doing whatever hardly causes a problem, but trying to legislate does. In the end people shouldn't worry about it too much and just sprot what is. Nowadays every article that Nangparbat (talk · contribs) touches in sprotected, and there are tons of them YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 02:22, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question: People say this is for obvious vandalism only - does that mean reviewers will be immune from all other claims of against-policy-behavior? Or will reviewers be prone to getting WP:OR, WP:SYNTH, WP:NPOV, and WP:RS-warnings from people who disagree with the "OK-ing"? (This is similar to the above concerns about "liability," but not with regards to a real-world-courts, but rather internally) Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 02:52, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Amy reason why the !votes can't be refactored and trhe bulleting turned into numbering so that we have an idea of the numbers on each side? I lost count when both were in the 30s.--Peter cohen (talk) 10:06, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Since it's not clear what people are !voting on it's entirely appropriate to not be clear how many !votes there are. (OK in technical terms it's clear - turn FR German-style on. But policy-wise, no: eg which articles covered, reviewing policy, reviewer selection, failure criteria for turning the thing off as a disaster, criteria for keeping this "stopgap" rather than moving to the long-delayed agreed system which will probably never materialise if this "stopgap" is implemented...)Rd232 talk 11:36, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • The talk about Flagged Revisions, et. al., has obviously been going on for quite some time. Maybe, as a newbie to the whole discussion, I might offer a suggestion. I'm fairly sure that this probably doesn't belongs here so, if someone could tell me where it should be placed, I will transfer it there. It is certainly possible that something similar has been proposed and rejected before; in which case, you can tell me to shut up.
It seems to me that all the talk about "flagged revisions" has gotten too complex. This is a simplified proposal, intended as a stop-gap while you work out the full implementation, however long it takes.
Any time a non-autoconfirmed editor makes a change, it is immediately displayed but with a line (I picture this as a single yellow line with black text at the top of the page) saying:
This version has not been reviewed. To see the latest reviewed version, press here.
If the user does, the yellow banner will display:
This is the latest reviewed version. To see the current, unreviewed version, press here.
At the same time, for both displays, an autoconfirmed user will also see:
You can help by reviewing this article. Press here.
Remember, all of this is displayed on one line, perhaps 15 pixels high.
If the autoconfirmed user clicks-on the second here, he will be presented with a diff between the current, unreviewed version and the latest reviewed version followed by:
Press here if you think that the edits above are acceptable to the general public.
If he does then the current version becomes the latest reviewed version and the banner disappears.
And that's all. No need for a special class of reviewers. No need for any extra, administator-maintained user switches. And it may just be good enough.
There are some details about how to show the reviewer's OK in History and to allow an autoconfirmed editor making changes to either accept the article as reviewed or simply accept his edits without changing the the article's reviewed status.
This is the default for unregistered users but these choices should be maleable in the user preferences. This includes whether or not to see the "This version has not been / This is the latest" banners at all and whether to first view the current version or the latest reviewed version. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 14:22, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Here's an idea. How about we virtually fork Wikipedia? Create a separate extension, say, "flagged-en.wikipedia.org" where you can turn flagged revisions on, running from the same database, but which always displays the last "sighted" version, and you can leave the old en-wiki as it is, and have your trial and your freedom to edit too. We can see if there's any significant divergence b/w the two variants in terms of quality, reputation for reliability, etc., after a period of 6 months or so. RayTalk 15:26, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • With it detailed, I like it even less. Of course we wouldn't need a new permission, because RCP and Rollback exist. For extra-troublesome articles, we have semi-protection. This process encourages any autoconfirmed user to determine what an "okay" edit is? We have enough problems keeping edits acceptable on controversial articles or BLPs and we want to let anyone okay things? We're encouraging people that have no idea what a diff is to okay possibly questionable edits. No. How on earth does that improve article quality? Sounds oddly like the story in the US media about a child being allowed to take control of air traffic control directions. How can we take a specialized all-volunteer ((WP:RCP)) army and claiming it's "better" by handing every citizen a gun? Beans, please! Good grief. I honestly hope I'm wrong, so if there's an actual advantage to improving BLPs in particular and would stop the edit warring that ruins many, I'm all ears. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 16:29, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • "We're encouraging people that have no idea what a diff is to okay possibly questionable edits." How about this on the prompt line:
If you are comfortable viewing the edits presented above, press here
if you think that the edits above are acceptable to the general public.
And yes, it does improve quality. If the auto-user is correct, then quality is improved. If the auto-user is wrong, then we are no worse off than the situation now. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 21:03, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A panic reaction after management neglect

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I am not usually a critic of Wikipedia's management, but this proposal simply does not add up. It is an irresponsible panic reaction to a situation caused largely by management neglect. I don't know whether this has so far been a board-level issue, but if it is not, then the board should now be asking some hard questions.

This reminds me of the routine political equivalent: long-term neglect leads to a crisis, with the negative new headlines piling up. The only way to restore the illusion of political leadership is to propose bold and decisive action, so that the "leader" can be seen to be doing something. The actual quality of the proposed solution doesn't matters: what the politician needs is a simple announcement to say "I'm a decisive leader and I've fixed it", but if the fix falls apart somewhere down the road, it will usually do so with less fanfare. In the UK the classic example of this is the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, a law which in most key respects was next-to useless, after being rushed through in a panic.

Why does this look like panic? Because the situation was entirely foreseeable. The trigger for this is the "breaching experiment", but the "breaching experiment" is just the sort of thing which should take place regularly to check BLP scrutiny systems; the only real surprise about this one is the fact that anyone was surprised by its occurrence or by its outcome. If the foundation management was not routinely ensuring that this sort of test was conducted, it was asleep on the job.

Why allege neglect? Because a trial of flagged revisions was agreed by the community 11 months ago. If flagged revisions are seen as an essential component of BLP protection, and BLP protection is seen as a high priority of the foundation, then why on earth was the coding not made a top priority? This is a stunning degree of neglect, and the community needs an explanation. (I hope that the board is already demanding one).

However, after 11 months the coding is incomplete, so we are being asked to accept a rushed implementation of a system which the community feels is flawed, without even a time limit on the so-called "trial". Sorry Jimbo, but "no". A management failure to ensure that the agreed trial can happen should not trigger a panic adoption of something which the community has rejected.

(Note that I am assuming good faith here. In politics, a crisis such as this is often used in a cynically opportunistic way to drive through measures which those in power know would otherwise be rejected. I want to continue to believe that Jimbo has better values than that, and that this is just panic after neglect, per the old maxim of never attributing to conspiracy something explicable as a cockup).

Focus on the point of greatest vulnerability. I accept that since the extent of the security hole has now been revealed, something needs to be done to plug it in the short-term. I believe that quick fixes should be as minimal as possible, so let's focus on whether the security breach occurred: at WP:DYK. Without DYK, the breaching experiment would have been an obscure issue; it was DYK which place the hoax in a prominent place. I have been saddened by the criticism hurled at the hard-working editors who run DYK: they are being blamed for failings outside their control (such as untruths being inserted after the article was reviewed), and being criticised for the consequences of a generally lax approach to BLPs. Yes, they missed a trick; but they did so within a flawed system, and I hate seeing individuals castigated for systemic failings.

Temporary fix. Rather than rushing a major change to the whole of wikipedia, let's focus on ways of ensuring that DYK is not abused in this fashion until a wider fix is in place. I can see several temporary fixes which could help: e.g. fully-protecting DYK articles while they are on the front page; banning BLPs from the front page; lengthening the DYK process to allow the hook-checkers to pass their shortlist of articles on to a separate ref-checker team; requiring on-line RS refs for any BLP-related material. Steps such as those, whether singly or in combination, would provide a short-term fix to the weakest point, without rushing into making a big change to the rest of Wikipedia. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:26, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  1. Endorse. Rd232 talk 19:51, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. I dunno that we want to start a user-generated subpoll here, but for the record I too endorse these sentiments. The problem with DYK is a problem with DYK, and plenty of people already knew about the cultural problem there, because we had to go through a copyright sweep already. You fix DYK by fixing DYK, not by rushing through a do-something change in the whole wiki. — Gavia immer (talk) 01:02, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  3. My comment above was that if Jimbo is proposing this, he should also be resigning from the board as a recognition of failure. BHG puts a little more polish on the turd, so I endorse this statement. Franamax (talk) 01:39, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Endorse. BHG has eloquently expressed my concerns not only about Flagged Revisions (which I could probably live with if it helped to keep out derogatory information about living people), but the entire BLP policy. (The simplest & best solution to the problem would be to have more eyes reviewing articles at all stages of their development/maintenance -- but it seems no one has seriously discussed that solution.) -- llywrch (talk) 21:53, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Endorse. Another good example of panic was disabling anonymous page creation as a sop to the media during the Seigenthaler incident. IIRC, even Jimbo has admitted the disability has done nothing useful. --Gwern (contribs) 02:02 10 March 2010 (GMT)

Alternative explanation (feature creep)

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The implementation used by the German Wikipedia would have been suitable for us. However, the fact that a lot of people rejected flagged revisions altogether made it necessary to find a compromise. This compromise consisted in complicated changes to the flagged revisions system, designed by committee. Design by committee is a well-known cause of feature creep in software, often resulting in delayed or buggy delivery or even complete failure of a project. Once a feature creepy specification has failed it makes sense to restart with a conservative implementation without the bloat. Hans Adler 19:35, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not the German solution would have been suitable (the consensus was no), there is still a management failing here. If the committee-designed version could not be implemented at reasonable cost or in reasonable time, the foundation or its staff should have returned to the community to say so. Leaving things to drift and then panic-jumping into saying "let's use what you rejected" is not good management. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:09, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Both of these points sound reasonable. Has there been a discussion somewhere before about the way input of people with necessary technical expertise is fed into community discussions when solutions are proposed that require a technical implementation? If not, then there ought to be. TheGrappler (talk) 22:05, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
None of the proposed revisions were particularly complicated, especially not when compared to the system as a whole. The core of the requested new functionality (the ability to set flagging levels using the protection interface) was working almost a year ago in any case. --Gmaxwell (talk) 00:32, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
So what has happened in the last year to build on that care? Answers, please, Jimbo. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:37, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
See the thread on foundation-l. I really can't make enough sense of the justification given to fairly represent it here. --Gmaxwell (talk) 02:46, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Mostly adapting the extension to the en.wikipedia environment. The same problems would arise for an implementation of classic FlaggedRevs. That's why there's no guarantee whatsoever that implementing the classic FlaggedRevs would be any faster than implementing the FPPR version now, and it would considerably delay the FPPR implementation considering our lack of developers. Cenarium (talk) 14:20, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. The existing software has some flexibility through options and policy, and it would certainly serve our needs of flagging a smaller subset of articles. I think that much of the initial opposition confused the software with the policy on de.wp, which we need not adopt. Cool Hand Luke 04:37, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
(re Hans Adler) That's a very unfair and offensive thing to say. FPPR has been adopted as a result of a long and comprehensive consensus building process, in which all the questions raised in this poll had been thoroughly discussed, especially the seemingly incompatible needs in our context of using Flagged Revisions as a form of protection and of monitoring (some supporters in this poll want to use if for the later, some for the former, some for both, but most agree that using it for both would result in huge backlogs); this was in the end the only solution we could find and agree on. It is based on the simple and powerful principle of allowing us to use flagged revisions passively on all articles, and the ability for admins to make it 'active' on a per-article basis. Most of the specifics of the configuration itself are coded since mid 2009, the problem is in adapting FlaggedRevs to en.wikipedia. Cenarium (talk) 14:20, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't make much sense to call what I said unfair and offensive when you then go on to say the same thing with different words. You are describing an amplification of the specified features as carried out by a committee.
However, your point that the problem is not the new features but the adaptation to EN is interesting. I'm a bit surprised, because if that's true I would think that the adaptation to DE should have had the same problem. Shouldn't it be easier now that it has been done already? Or do we have additional, incompatible features enabled that make the situation much more complicated than that of DE? Hans Adler 14:55, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, I do not believe it's characteristic of design by committee, it's design by consensus to some extent, maybe, but then again it's how we make decisions around here, and many users have worked hard to reach that consensus. The accepted proposal rely on a very simple principle which I expose above and resolved many issues which were previously a barrage to any implementation. That project isn't 'bloated by feature creep'. There may have been one unessential feature, the full flagged protection level, and there's been some discussion about precedence between patrolling and flagged protection reviewing levels, but it's at the implementation level and mostly up to developers.
From reading the mailing list thread, developers have difficulties in setting up a wiki which would reproduce the conditions of en.wp where they could test FlaggedRevs. It seems to be an essential point, you could ask them why, probably because of the higher readership, volume of editing, and all technical specifications of enwiki. Yes, I think we can say it's much more complex to implement any FlaggedRevs configuration on en.wp than on de.wp. In addition to this there's the recently created user experience/usability team who's gotten involved, they make a point of polishing up the implementation before the trial (and improve the extension itself, so their work should affect de.wp too). This all resulted in long delays (the FlaggedRevs specifics have been worked out for the most part a long time ago); and this would have happened too if we had asked for the de.wp implementation, and asking now to implement it would not only further delay the implementation of FPPR, but most certainly take several months before implementation. They'd have to put aside all the work done and restart it with a de.wp implementation, and they would still have to create and test in an environment similar to en.wp... Curiously, when the decision was taken on de.wikipedia to implement ? Cenarium (talk) 17:09, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How does it work when editing?

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Suppose you go to an article to report some well-known fact about someone in perfect innocence. But after the last approved version, someone has added something about his daughter being a lesbian. Now, you don't know if his daughter is notable, if she's really a lesbian, and whether Wikipedia editors' Kafkaesque policy interpretations allow or don't allow that to be mentioned even if it has been published. So if you make an edit to this "unsighted" (?) version, then will your uncontroversial fact ever make it into the article? Or have you wasted your time when someone goes back to a sighted version and adds only a few favorite changes to that forgetting all about yours? I'm worried that what we'll actually see are reviewers or worried editors doing a hatchet job on facts they don't know or care about, just to get what they do care about through the process. It seems like a triumph of the reversionists, and I'd prefer a dozen vandals to any one of these self-important people who run around and deliberately misinterpret policy to explain why your sourced edit can't be in the article, who try to set themselves as your boss and editor who you're supposed to play a guessing game with until your work is finally so reduced and abused that they'll deign to let it pass. Wnt (talk) 05:48, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

At the German Wikipedia, most of the time edits are sighted or reverted before someone else edits. This is because the more active articles are generally on more people's watchlists. When it does happen, an editor with sighting rights has all the normal options. The page history contains all edits, each annotated with "automatically sighted" (if made by a sighter and the previous version was already sighted), "sighted by X" (if made by a non-sighter) or not annotated (if not a sighted version). In the situation you describe – unless very special circumstances make it relevant the statement about the daughter is obviously inappropriate – I would pick out the problematic diff, undo it in the normal way and sight afterwards. Or remove the problematic statement manually from the latest version before sighting, whichever is easier.
The rare occasions when something like this happens and additionally you are not sure whether an intermediate edit was OK or not are quite annoying. I have seen this once or twice and simply left it for someone with an opinion to handle. This obviously results in slightly delayed sighting, but since it is so rare it doesn't affect the overall experience much. Hans Adler 06:15, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are BLPs really more dangerous than other articles?

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I've seen this BLP frenzy all over Wikipedia, but is it justified? All the really big liability judgments I hear about (like the Food Lion case) are for defaming corporations, or in the case of Oprah Winfrey, for libeling beef. Where people really get into the big money is when they say something that negatively impacts stock price (oddly enough, they never seem to get any credit after the price recovers, nor does the company ever offer to pay them a billion dollars of imaginary money if their false statement drove the price up a bit, but I digress) Maybe Wikipedia focuses on these only as a matter of courtesy or reputation, but what kind of courtesy is it to say that great, your dad just died, now we can vandalize his article! Despite the many comments above, I think this policy is a tumor growing out of control and looking for a place to metastasize to. Wnt (talk) 06:00, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly, I am personally more worried about destroying someone's life (e.g. someone just switched jobs, new employer googles name during probation period and sacks based on negative misinformation) than about getting Wikimedia into a lawsuit. I guess Wikimedia is somewhat protected against corporations by the fact that such a lawsuit would be extremely bad publicity for them. Hans Adler 06:31, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't about avoiding legal liability; that's the Foundation's business. Rather, this is about avoiding harm to people because it's the morally right thing to do. BLPs are potentially more harmful because pages titled after a named individual will tend to top their google rankings, and the contents of these biographies will be taken seriously, especially in the case of lower-profile individuals who do not have a lot of other coverage. I believe that we have a moral imperative to avoid real-world harm. Cool Hand Luke 16:10, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Read this [6] 96.24.231.191 (talk) 18:34, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
These are good points, though the second tends to contradict the first. But when people comment about the damage done to individuals because Wikipedia articles top the Google rankings: That is not our decision. It seems to me that if Google leads employers to the false allegation, knowing that they're favoring a page anyone can edit above pages that may be professional in nature, they are as culpable as anyone else involved. (I'm not saying that they should be legally culpable — an end to libel law, if accompanied by an increase in hoaxes and false rumors, would soon teach employers to stop making such invasive use of hearsay and be of benefit to all)
If we want to stop unsourced or poorly sourced or poorly maintained or newly created or poorly assessed BLPs from having such effects, then we could either work out a deal with Google to rank them lower on the search results, or else use robots.txt to ban their indexing altogether. We have an elaborate system of Wikiprojects and ratings - there must be a way for search engines to use that. Wnt (talk) 00:58, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A perfect example is the Gilad Atzmon article where despite his filing an OTRS in spring 2009 and admins coming along and deleting all the questionable material, highly partisan editors keep coming back, defaming Atzmon in the talk page and in noticeboards in order to maintain "attack sections" in the article, using guilty-by-association techniques against anyone who tries to comply with BLP policy and wikihounding me when I bring issues to noticeboards using false accusations, poisoning the waters in my trying to get a neutral opinion. There's real partisan tag teaming going on now on a number of BLPs and articles about organizations and WP:ARBPIA has proved ineffective, for reasons you all may understand better than me. I don't know if flagging is the answer, but there is a problem in BLPs where there are a number of highly motivated detractors. CarolMooreDC (talk) 12:29, 10 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This won't do much anyways

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So I checked out the German site while logged out and seriously wonder what this would solve (provided there is a problem). You go to an article that has a small icon in the top corner that sighted "sighted". Next to it, it gives you a button that says "view unsighted" (or something like that). You click and you see whatever potential vandalism or libel took place in full bloom. What gives? Anybody will still be able to read the line "he killed his 10 neighbors in cold blood" or whatever gibberish. The presumably "hidden" version is just one click away. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 19:13, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Similarly, anybody can read past vandalism in an article's history. The vast majority of users do not, however—they go to the page linked by google. We should strive prevent actual harm to individuals, and not fret that we can't prevent 100% of the harm—preventing any of it is an improvement over the status quo. Cool Hand Luke 20:59, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, well... maybe that's true. But reading diffs in a history takes longer to figure out how to do. I'm more trying to make the point that some harsher measures might be needed to actually solve the perceived problems... Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 21:16, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's another click, and not one they're likely to make. Ask your non-editor friends if they have ever clicked on the "history" or "discussion" of a Wikipedia article. Not many have, and the few who have do it rarely—even when there's a huge "dispute" template. At any rate, I believe that the "unsighted" message can be customized by editing mediawiki pages. If we want a less prominent note, we can make it. Cool Hand Luke 21:26, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As I understand it, we can easily tweak the flagged revisions set-up so that our readers cannot view unsighted revisions. So if the configuration that the Germans are using is found to be problematic (although, per CHL, I maintain that it isn't), a developer could easily remedy our concerns. AGK 18:19, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It seems like this assumes that a vandal will follow the rules. Nobody knows better than a vandal's sock puppet when to review the article and approve the changes. And the more Wikipedia struggles to make it look like no untrue edit can be added, the more damaging a libel will be when it is cleverly inserted. Wnt (talk) 19:28, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
In other words, given enough cunning & malice, any article on Wikipedia can be suborned to contain damaging material. (This is what I see the latest disruptive experiment involving DYK has shown us.) So how do Wikipedia's current practices stack up against all other information media? One of the overlooked discoveries of the Siegenthaler incident was that it is far easier to correct errors on Wikipedia about living people at that time than it was to get newspapers, magazines, or other news media to publish retractions or corrections. I would imagine that with all of the WP:BLP advocates doing the same would be even more easier now.) -- llywrch (talk) 21:57, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This is precisely my point against flagged revisions. There seems to be a naive assumption that flagged revisions would "just work" to exclude all possible vandalism, and it would certainly exclude crapflood additions that look like "brssjflmpfg [[Media:Example:ogg]]" or similar - but if a vandal gets odious but plausible (or overlookable) vandalism into an article, the mechanisms that propose to keep bad things out will actually conspire to keep them in - if they're in a sighted version, only editors with the ability to sight new revisions can fix things, and they will tend to prefer the "reviewed" sighted version over casual attempts to fix it. — Gavia immer (talk) 22:17, 8 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I am wondering why some are considering that the time the German WP needs for flagging the articles is unacceptable but not to complain that vandalism like that isn't reverted for 32 days. --Matthiasb (talk) 20:51, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
aggregate statistics vs isolated examples? Rd232 talk 21:40, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. For readers it is better that new informations doesn't show up for a couple of days than having bullshit in an article visible for several hours. (However most articles are flagged within an hour; most of those articles which are not flagged for several days are watched by only one or two wikipedians, sometimes they're totally unwatched. --Matthiasb (talk) 09:32, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How to get it done faster

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In my long and painful experience managing software projects, it rarely helps to redirect a project when it is in it's final stages, as his one seems to be, especially when the people working on the project seem basically competent. What does help is to ask the staff if there is anything they could use that would aid progress. For example, the email thread said they were reconfiguring an old server to use as a test bed. Why not buy them a new server instead? Also, while it typically takes too much time for a new developer to get up to speed to be of much help in the late stages of a project, adding a couple of experienced testers, even on a temporary contract, can often be very helpful and save a lot of developer time. In the current labor market, such people should be easy to find. If this is so important, and I agree it is, the money should be made available and special fundraising might be appropriate. --agr (talk) 15:06, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Money and resources aren't the problem, there's at least 3 people being paid to work on it already. The problem is simply mismanagement.
  • The 2 people in charge of the improvements were not hired for months after we already made a decision on FR.
  • They were not given any deadlines nor were they asked to create a schedule or timeline.
  • It shouldn't take any extra work to turn on the German system here. If it does, it would mean that the foundation used, and continues to use, software that they consider substandard on the 2nd largest Wikipedia.
-- Mr.Z-man 00:05, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's my understanding that the proposal to turn on the German system was not adopted, so how much effort it might take is moot. The version that is being implemented for the English wikipedia involves significant changes and that is the current source of the delay. Critiquing earlier project management won't get the needed work completed any sooner. My suggestions might.--agr (talk) 20:48, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Timing

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This subject has been kicking around for a long time. It is unfortunate that the "poll" was open for less than a week and that many people (including me) did not become aware of it before it closed. Would it be better to adopt a well-publicized process that could take into account that editors do not use Wikipedia 24/7? Thanks. Racepacket (talk) 22:33, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, to my surprise I also just passed by an invitation to what seems to be a cherry-picked audience for a "quick poll". Reminds me of some wise words of what sausages and policies have in common, the more you know of their creation, the less you value them. This poll is arrogant and disrespectful to the volunteers that run this place. Power.corrupts (talk) 01:31, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Please read this. --Yair rand (talk) 01:58, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Cherry-picked audience? It was listed on two village pumps, the centralized discussion template, and the administrators' noticeboard. Short of putting it in the watchlist notice, it doesn't get much more widely advertised than that. Mr.Z-man 02:46, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It was not listed in those places by way of any effort on Jimbo's part; he just announced it on his main talk page. If there hadn't been an effort by early commenters to get the poll listed in such locations, I (for one) would never have known of it. — Gavia immer (talk) 03:13, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
True, but I don't think its really fair to attribute that to bad faith on Jimbo's part. Mr.Z-man 03:27, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Jimmy tends to just post things (like ArbCom appointments, for example) to his talk page and let the word spread from there. It usually works pretty well. --Tango (talk) 22:37, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The whole idea of the polls closing is bad. This is a wiki. Anybody can interpret the current "opinion" of the poll at a given moment. But there's no need to prevent the addition of new votes and views. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:22, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I know I wasn't cherry-picked, but I might have made an even more skeptical response with longer to think it over. I just had a look at Special:Newpages for the first time... O-My-God, we're backlogged almost a month with unpatrolled new articles, and some people think we'll be able to review every edit? Wnt (talk) 21:53, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Please see my comments in the poll about how FlaggedRevs actually works. Even if we did adopt the German system, we would not have to review every edit. We would never have to review most of the edits by established users and bots, and it would be months, if not years, after deployment before we had to review edits to every article. Recentchanges patrol (which is a better comparison than newpages patrol) seems to have little trouble reviewing almost every edit already, and some features of FR would make the process even more efficient than now. Mr.Z-man 23:57, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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