Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press
One observation on persistently heavily vandalized articles. It's worth to try pending changes on them. It may, and probably will, reduce to some extent the level of vandalism. If, however, the level of vandalism remains so high that it's counter-productive, i.e. wastes community resources for no sensible benefit of good edits, then we should use semi-protection. But we shouldn't think that it can't work and not try. On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:47 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing protection. [snip] I couldn't disagree more strongly. If we were making a judgement on the basis of count of good edits to vandalism edits we would conclude that the best solution would be to protect everything— with the paradoxical effect of Wikipedia not existing at all. The reality is that the goodness of a good edit is so good relative to the baddness of a bad edit, mostly because of the tools and resources that we have to deal with bad edits, that we can pretty much disregard the vandalism side of that particular equation entirely. Undo/rollback are easy buttons, and we have many contributors who do nothing but remove obviously bad stuff (and some who, honestly, aren't qualified to do much else!). Without this truth Wikipedia simply couldn't work. The notion that the basic workload of dealing with simple vandalism (as opposed, say, the timeliness of the corrections or the quality of the articles in the interim) is a significant problem is unsupported by any objective measurement which I've seen, I'd love to see pointers suggesting otherwise. I've always believed that we use protection as a short term measure to preserve the quality of the articles displayed to readers (who are indifferent to our internal process) and the protection policy on Enwp is quite explicit that the purpose of protection is not pre-emptive ([[WP:NO-PREEMPT]]). I think it's characteristic of an 'administrative bias' to assume that protection is intended to be a workload reducer, if you're constantly dealing with the problem cases you're going to overestimate their magnitude. This concern also neglects the reduction in the incentive to vandalize that pending revisions ought to create. Whatever portion of the incentive to make trouble is related to the high visibility of the trouble should be reduced. Of course, we now have many troublemakers who don't care about visibility at all— they make trouble purely to irritate Wikipedians. But these WillyOnWheels class trouble makers are perfectly happy to make their trouble on less prominent pages which have never enjoyed persistent protection, since even obscure pages are fine for the purpose of irritating Wikipedians. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
To Risker: *Edits by reviewers to articles with pending changes are automatically accepted. NO, the reviewer has to manually accept the new revision, and you could have asked **before** creating this mountain of drama and FUD on enwiki, or tested the configuration yourself, or read the documentation, as this is stated very clearly in the tables at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes. *Pending changes will help to reduce visibility of vandalism and BLP violations Yes, classic protection is way too rigid for Wikipedia today, and has always been too rigid. The flexibility of pending changes protection will allow to use protection where needed, and only where needed, more than classic protection would have ever allowed on its own. The protection policy allows for a considerable amount of discretion, and it is evident that administrators in general would be more willing to apply pending changes protection on articles subject to vandalism or BLP violations than they would otherwise have been with the rigid semi-protection. As long as we can keep up with the backlog, this is a win-win situation. *Pending changes will encourage more non-editors to try to edit, and these new editors will become part of our community. Yes, and no. We may not gain considerably more editors, because it would concern a small number of articles, but every edit makes an editor, even if one-time. No to the second part, because every editor *is* a member of the community. The community is not only the most active editors. And yes, there are people trying to edit semi-protected pages, and in a constructive way. Since we modified the Protectedpagetexthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Protectedpagetextto make submitting edit requests more accessible, we've received many more, the vast majority of those are in good-faith, so there are definitely people out there trying to edit. *Pending changes will help with disputes. No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in the trial policy (scope section), that pending changes protection, level 1 or 2, should not be used on pages subject to disputes. *Anonymous editors will now be able to edit the [[George W. Bush]] and [[Barack Obama]] articles. No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in the trial policy (scope section), that pages subject to too high levels of vandalism should not be protected with pending changes but classic protection. Cenarium On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 7:12 AM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 06/14/2010 09:56 PM, Risker wrote: If there is no intention at this time to stop the trial and deactivate the extension on August 15th, I'd like the WMF and the developers to say so now. This is, as the community requested, a 60-day trial. At the end of that, unless the community clearly requests otherwise, we'll turn it back off. Assuming that the trial starts on time, it will also end on time. I'll note that both the start and the end of the trial are mainly up to the community. People have to agree to start using it, and which articles to start with. At the end, if there is no decision to extend the trial or to permanently adopt Pending Changes, the community will probably need to go and switch all Pending Changes articles to something else. (Unless they'd like us just to switch them en masse to, say, semi-protection, but that seems a bit crude.) So I think the real question isn't the WMF's intention; it's the community's intention. As it should be. William ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
Can you please identify methods in which we can measure the improvement here? Are you proposing, even before the trial starts, to start including articles that do not meet the criteria for page protection? Let's be clear, Cenarium; the trial is very specifically only to be used on pages that meet the *current* criteria for page protection; what you're suggesting here is something completely unrelated to the trial of pending changes in and of itself. You know well that there are no objective way to say if an article meets the 'criteria' or not. If you ask different admins about a particular situation, some will say no protection is warranted, some will say temporary semi-protection is, of variable length, and some say that indefinite semi-protection is. The protection policy says 'heavy and persistent vandalism or violations of content policy' for indefinite, and 'Subject to significant but temporary vandalism or disruption' for temporary, this allows for considerable discretion. And since pending changes protection is much less restrictive than semi-protection, admins will naturally lower their personal threshold for applying it. There are several admins who apply a threshold considerably lower than average, their semi-protections are often contested but almost always uphold, or with no admin going ahead to remove them. When several admins started to make use of ' liberal semi' for BLPs, there has been considerable objection (by me among others) but almost all protections stayed. There we see the two contradictory needs, to better protect articles, BLPs in particular, versus to keep articles editable. Excessive protection (of any kind) is bad; but BLPs subject to vandalism or BLP violations to a level where semi-protection would be within discretion, but just below the threshold where most admins would protect, is not satisfactory. By its flexibility, pending changes allows to better balance those two contradictory needs. A great advantage of pending changes protection is that we can see edits, so determine to a certain extent if protection is still warranted. With semi-protection we can only guess. So we'll be in better measure to remove pending changes protection were no longer needed. This means we'll simultaneously be able to handle more cases for protection, and remove protection where no longer needed. The total of protection may not even grow sensibly at all, but protection would be better distributed. We just need to keep an eye on the backlog and adjust if necessary. In the trial we may not readily see this happening, because it would be more limited and controlled, but I'm sure it will occur to a certain extent. This won't handle all issues, especially isolated vandalism and BLP violations, where protection cannot be used per policy, which is why we vitally need better monitoring tools, like patrolled revisions. I would strongly oppose any attempt to no longer regard the protection policy for using pending changes, or alter the protection policy to extend its scope. For discussion of methods, see Wikipedia talk:Pending changes/Trial. This is a very dangerous view on the issue. This is what people who strenously opposed the new mechanism were most afraid of, and the supporters originally said would not be a danger. If this really happened, I could easily see many of the people originally in support of the new mechanism, could do a full volte-face and come strongly in opposition of the mechanism. Supporters of the original agreement often voiced the proviso that using the mechanism for semied/BLP's or whatever their personal threshold was, would never ever be a thin end of the wedge to spread things out to things we wouldn't semi currently. That is the *old* *agreement* on this issue. A huge drive by any tiny group of blow-hard editors to expand use of the mechanism beyond what we currently semi, could back-fire spectacularly. I don't dispute that in the fullness of time; years or decades from now, it might eventually go that route, but that is a completely different issue, and I suspect there would be many more important community supported initiatives that would have to be accepted in the interim, before that could remotely be acceptable. People were mostly afraid to see this becoming a FlaggedRevs implementation similar or close to that on de.wikipedia, which is very different from what I imagine. The idea of Yamamoto Ichirohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yamamoto_Ichiroto use flaggedrevs as an alternative to protection was a breakthrough because it allows not only more editability than classic protection but also to better control uses of protection, as I explain above, this allows a much finer distribution, to apply it where it is needed, and only where it is needed, more than classic protection would ever allow. Pending changes is now heavily associated with protection, even on the technical side. The protection policy acts as a safeguard against
Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
We could also implement as scheduled, but refrain from using pending changes in mainspace until we're ready. This way, reviewers could start testing in Wikipedia namespace before it's rolled out on articles. The issue of using level 2 PC-protection is not resolved yet, so we may request a configuration change if there's consensus for not using it. On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Cenarium sysop cenarium.sy...@gmail.comwrote: You'll soon have your answer here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Reviewing#Proposing_a_delay_to_trial_implementation. There are many outstanding issues to address and still quite a deal of preparation to be made. Again people didn't get involved until a launch date was fixed, it may be hard to define one in advance, but that's how it is. On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 2:46 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: On 14 June 2010 01:42, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 06/13/2010 03:59 PM, David Goodman wrote: There has never been agreement for more than the 2,000. It will be necessary to ask the community at that point whether to expand , continue, or end the trial. Ok. Since the 2000 limit initially came from the Foundation side of things rather than from the community, I was being especially careful not to presume. But from the mailing list and on-wiki goings on, it looks like the community prefers a software-enforced numeric limit regardless of technical capacity, so we'll plan to leave the limit in place until we hear otherwise. I think the trial was limited by time, rather than number of articles. It's a 2 month trial, if memory serves. After that we need another poll if we're going to keep it going. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
The issue is not people objecting but preparation of the trial, so it's not chaos. Or you could yourself help in the preparation of the trial, so we'd go faster ? On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 10:15 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 14 June 2010 09:12, Cenarium sysop cenarium.sy...@gmail.com wrote: We could also implement as scheduled, but refrain from using pending changes in mainspace until we're ready. This way, reviewers could start testing in Wikipedia namespace before it's rolled out on articles. The issue of using level 2 PC-protection is not resolved yet, so we may request a configuration change if there's consensus for not using it. Or we could just do it, since objectors have had *three years* to faff about in. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
You'll soon have your answer here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Reviewing#Proposing_a_delay_to_trial_implementation. There are many outstanding issues to address and still quite a deal of preparation to be made. Again people didn't get involved until a launch date was fixed, it may be hard to define one in advance, but that's how it is. On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 2:46 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: On 14 June 2010 01:42, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 06/13/2010 03:59 PM, David Goodman wrote: There has never been agreement for more than the 2,000. It will be necessary to ask the community at that point whether to expand , continue, or end the trial. Ok. Since the 2000 limit initially came from the Foundation side of things rather than from the community, I was being especially careful not to presume. But from the mailing list and on-wiki goings on, it looks like the community prefers a software-enforced numeric limit regardless of technical capacity, so we'll plan to leave the limit in place until we hear otherwise. I think the trial was limited by time, rather than number of articles. It's a 2 month trial, if memory serves. After that we need another poll if we're going to keep it going. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
10 days is a bit short for preparation, as most people didn't get involved until a launch date was fixed. It would have been nice if we had had a bit more time, but we should broadly be ready. It's also not impossible that we request some configuration changes before or during the trial. On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:31 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 11:54 AM, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: One thing needed - can someone reply to this thread with a list of all Flagged Revs related pages (whether RFCs, proposals, or major threads) so we can see what's out there? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Searchfulltext=Searchns0=1ns1=1ns2=1ns3=1ns4=1ns5=1ns6=1ns7=1ns8=1ns9=1ns10=1ns11=1ns12=1ns13=1ns14=1ns15=1ns100=1ns101=1ns108=1ns109=1redirs=0search=WP%3AFlagged Will get most of the pages (in the WP ns at least). -Peachey ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
As I'm actively involved in the preparation of the trial, I assure 10 days is short. Most people don't get involved until a launch date is fixed, especially in this situation where we had to wait for a year with nothing coming so people just waited for something consistent to get involved. And now we need to quickly find consensus on remaining policy issues, write documentation, etc. So I wouldn't have preferred that it be launched later, because we've waited enough, but that the launch date be given at least 3 weeks in advance. On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Amory Meltzer amorymelt...@gmail.comwrote: There was always going to be a bit of Damned if you do, Damned if you don't; It's just unavoidable in a community this large. ~A ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Flagged protection/Pending changes trial - remaining issues and work
Input would be appreciated on-wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Flagged_revisions_trial. There are still a few issues to resolve, undecided points and various work to be done. It's certainly not enough to delay the implementation, but we need some more help, for example in finalizing documentation pages. Thanks to all for making this possible. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
