The planned flagged protection and patrolled revisions trial received widespread media coverage, with over 500 related items appearing in Google News. Unfortunately, it appears that almost none of the media outlets accurately described the proposal as approved earlier this year. The disconnect between the proposal and the differing schemes described in the media prompted discussion among perplexed Wikipedians.
In March 2009, a poll to discuss Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions was held, resulting in 79.9% of discussants in approval. The proposal was for a two-month trial of a specific configuration of mw:Extension:FlaggedRevs, an extension of the site software. "Patrolled revisions" is meant to be the more widely used part of the proposal. It would allow reviewers to flag a particular revision of an article as "patrolled". However, viewers would still see the most recent revision, but would be offered the option of viewing the "patrolled revision" instead. The proposal also allows administrators to use "flagged protection" instead of normal protection in cases where protection is merited. Under flagged semi-protection, for example, an anonymous user would see the most recent revision flagged by a reviewer, while all other users would see the most recent revision.
Rather confusingly, the March proposal differs from Wikipedia:Flagged revisions, under which a January poll was held to carry out a variety of trials. That poll failed to reach the percentage that had previously been stated to comprise consensus, and sparked controversy when User:Jimbo Wales appealed to the Wikimedia Foundation to turn on the Flagged Revisions extension 'upon his personal recommendation.' While mw:Extension:FlaggedRevs is the software that allows both Flagged revisions and Flagged protection and patrolled revisions, only the software configuration approved in the poll for the latter was approved for use on English Wikipedia. While Wales had stated in early March, "I'm shopping a very premature proposal around to a few people, looking for broad consensus. News to come soon", it appears to have been superseded by the flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal. The Signpost noted as the March poll came to close, "It is yet to be seen whether Jimmy Wales will present his own compromise proposal to apply some form of flagged revisions to such biographies, as he indicated he would before the current proposal gained momentum." No such proposal to apply flagged revisions to BLPs as a class was ever put before the community, and the approved proposal states explicitly: "On the issue of biographies of living people, discussions have demonstrated the need to improve monitoring of these articles, and that flagging systems could help us to do so. But there is no consensus to use an active implementation (in which new edits are not shown to readers unless made by or flagged by trusted users) for all biographies of living people or an arbitrary subset of them, preemptively."
Since the end of the poll, English Wikipedia has been waiting for the developers to modify the FlaggedRevs extension to allow it to function as specified in the proposal. The most recent news before the media frenzy was on 23 August 2009, when the Wikimedia Tech blog noted, "A few highlights from the last week... Test wikis with Flagged Revisions and ReaderFeedback configurations have been set up to shake down UI and workflow before we prepare to deploy these extensions on English Wikipedia in the coming weeks."
Media coverage began on 24 August with a The New York Times article by Noam Cohen, who regularly writes on Wikipedia issues.[fr 1] The assertions made in this article were largely echoed verbatim by hundreds of media outlets. The article states,
Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
The new feature, called "flagged revisions", will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved—or in Wikispeak, flagged—it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable...
"We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks", said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. "There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion—whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now...
Foundation officials intend to put the system into effect first with articles about living people because those pieces are ripe for vandalism and because malicious information within them can be devastating to those individuals...
"It is a test", said Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia. "We will be interested to see all the questions raised. How long will it take for something to be approved? Will it take a couple of minutes, days, weeks?"
(Full disclosure: Michael Snow (User:Michael Snow) is the founding editor-in-chief of The Wikipedia Signpost.)
The first on-wiki discussion to pick up The New York Times story was at Wikipedia talk:Flagged revisions, where a commenter professed, "I saw that article and am confused; will this policy only affect pages that would previously have been semi-protected? Or all pages about living people?" Cenarium, who had helped organize the March poll, stated, "No, the media don't get things right as usual with wp. It'll be applied only for pages meeting the requirements for semi-protection, only a little more liberally for BLPs because there's a limited admin discretion. This is what the community approved : Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions, nothing else."
BBC News was the next major media outlet to pick up the story, up on the 25th, stating, "in a couple of weeks" "[t]he site will require that revisions to pages about living people and some organisations be approved by an editor." Mike Peel of Wikimedia UK (User:Mike Peel) was quoted: "For these articles, flagged protection will actually make them more open", and that BLPs are targeted as the "most high-profile pages with the highest probability of causing harm."[fr 2][fr 3]
This BBC article prompted a discussion on the Administrators' noticeboard, where some users criticized the fact that this news had not been announced to the community before the media. Gavia immer asserted, "It is not particularly helpful to get these announcements in the press, filtered through so many levels of abstraction that one is left guessing what the original announcement was." DuncanHill characterized the update on the Wikimedia Techblog, which was eventually pointed to, as "announced prominently in a place that no-one will notice".
In the AN discussion, Mike Peel noted,
I should explain that nothing I've said today is new—it's all been based on what information I've gathered from on-wiki, and also from the mailing lists. There was no announcement of any sort. I've also basically been fire-fighting - the press have been phoning the UK press phone, and I've been answering their questions to the best of my ability... I'd also add that the decision to trial flagged revisions is an en.wp decision by the community.
The Associated Press, while repeating the "all BLPs will be locked" storyline, also offered some context: "The same flagging process, for example, has been imposed on all entries in the German-language Wikipedia for more than a year. On the English site, too, high-profile pages that are likely to be defaced, such as Michael Jackson's, have been tightly restricted."[fr 4] Agence France-Presse repeated "stalling edits to English articles about living people", and interviewed Jay Walsh (User:JayWalsh), Foundation head of communications, who stated, "This doesn't undo Wikipedia's democratic spirit. People have a perception Wikipedia is straight forward; it's open and belongs to everybody. That is true and is not changing."[fr 5] Deutsche Welle expanded on AFP coverage by focusing on the German angle. Mediawiki developer Raimond Spekking (User:Raymond) was interviewed on the German experience of their configuration of FlaggedRevs:
"We ran a survey after the introduction and more than two thirds of people said they wanted us to continue with it."...
There are currently almost 7,500 editors working on the reviewing process, and although it is voluntary work, becoming a member of the team requires a certain amount of commitment.
"Users who make at least 300 edits in 60 days automatically qualify to become editors", Spekking explained. "Or if they cannot manage that, they can make an application and do just 200 edits in 60 days."...
Spekking said such criticism [that the feature was not true to the wiki ethos] was rife among German-speaking users around the time Wikipedia Deutschland launched its revision software, but he says there really is nothing to get worked up about.
"Articles can still be edited by anybody", he said, adding that the practice actually means it is possible to 'unlock' pages which have been closed to edits from the public on the grounds that they are at particularly high risk of vandalism. [fr 6]
Tech blogs, often well informed about Wikipedia matters, appeared to have some difficulty breaking free of the given narrative, with CNET actually linking to Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions in its almost correct statement, "Unlike the originally proposed 'flagged revisions' changes, the 'flagged protection and patrolled revisions' modifications would only apply to BLP articles." CNET further quotes Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado), author of The Wikipedia Revolution and co-host of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, who provided one of the few analyses based on the actual approved proposal that your writer found:
I would say the (real news is that) rather than seeing this as a lockdown of general articles--which it isn't--this has been developed as an alternative to full protection and semi-protection. It is an 'opening up' of sorts of...articles than have had to be locked down for awhile. So rather than semi-protection--newbies and anonymous people cannot edit--and full protection--only admins--this allows for these 'problem' articles to be re-opened up for editing, but providing a checking, or 'flagging' system to allow those edits to be screened.
The intent (of the) proposal, and I have to think that people will be faithful to that original premise, is that BLP was the motivation, and that the list of currently protected and semi-protected articles is the starting point, and straying too far off that path will be discouraged.[fr 7][fr 8]
Immediately after the news broke, User:Nihiltres posted an extensive explanation of the proposal to his blog. Nihiltres asserted "these plans are being critically misinterpreted by the media" and "there is more than enough fear, uncertainty and doubt around all things 'flagged revisions', and that is unhealthy for community discussions on how to run the project."[fr 9] This post became a basis for more accurate coverage by ReadWriteWeb.[fr 10] ReadWriteWeb also picked up a Foundation blog post by Erik Moeller (User:Eloquence), Deputy Director of Wikimedia Foundation, who linked to both the flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal and March poll, while stating, "we hope to be able to deploy Flagged Revisions in production use on the English Wikipedia within 2–3 months." He also initially stated that flagged protection would be implemented on all BLPs. While the post was soon updated to reflect the approved proposal, Nihiltres commented, "Bah. The media has been widely misreporting this story, and I see that even this, official channel is making mistakes on it. Does the FlaggedRevs software have some kind of curse on it to be forever misunderstood?"[fr 11][fr 12]
The Independent offered an in-depth feature analyzing the pros and cons of flagged edits, concluding, "Inevitably, imposing restrictions on the freedom with which contributors can edit pages will inhibit some from doing so. ... there's no need to think that millions of other contributors—who take care on updating entries relating to butterfly migrations, or theories of time travel, for example—would be in any way disincentivised. Theories suggesting this may be the beginning of the end of Wikipedia therefore seem premature."[fr 13] Meanwhile, CNN interviewed Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, who "cheered Wikipedia's decision, because without rules like those the site is testing, the encyclopedia would devolve 'into chaos,' she said. ... "It would basically be like a wall of graffiti in a bathroom... It's not going to be a very high level of discourse." CNN also interviewed Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, who stated, "As things get more and more popular online, some of these [Wikipedia-style] experiments realize they need to temper some of their experimental nature and learn from more traditional forms because they're just not sustainable.... It makes me shed a little tear, too, because presumably it will lead to a slowdown of new content creation, and it does seem like a departure from the essential nature of Wikipedia."[fr 14]
The PopWatch blog of Entertainment Weekly briefly got serious to comment, "On a practical level, this is a good decision: Accuracy and accountability are good things, and Wikipedia—like any other source—can always use more. On an abstract level, though, there’s part of me that wonders if this runs counter to the entire premise Wikipedia: The whole point was that it was a bottom-up process, not a top-down one", before directing readers to stand-up comic B. J. Novak's "Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Bicycle" routine.[fr 15]
The Guardian wrote an extensive editorial asserting,
Any alterations will soon have to be approved by one of an elite group of power editors before they go live. It is a modest step and a sensible one, fighting electronic vandalism and the temptation some feel to turn biographies into libellous diatribes, and yet it marks a sort of coming of age for the site. ... But the founding aim of the site was that anyone could change anything at any time and that all voices were equal: "Be Bold", it still urges all its users. Now Wikipedians have discovered that the wisdom of crowds cannot prevent the idiocy of individuals.[fr 16]
Larry Sanger (User:Larry Sanger), a co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Citizendium, was interviewed for the The Irish Times: "'It’s been one of the sorest points, how the site has played fast and loose with people’s reputations. ... It’s nice to see they’re doing more—but one has to ask if this will make much difference at all.' Sanger adds that while the changes would probably prevent casual vandalism of articles, 'it’s going to be fairly easy to get around these barriers if someone really wants to start a rumour' about a famous person."[fr 17]
PC World took issue with another site's assertion that "this announcement affirms the limitation of serious user generated content on the Web and reaffirms the necessity for professional or dedicated curators to ensure quality of information and lack of self-dealing or self-interested postings."[fr 18] PC World writer opined, "I feel as though this is a necessary step in taking a Web site from the playground to the stadium. Wikipedia should now be taken more seriously, rather than taken with a grain of salt."[fr 19]
Bonnie Erbe (User:Bigspringswillson) of U.S. News & World Report, who apparently was dissatisfied with her own BLP, states, "It means at the very least that I'm hardly alone in having dealt with Web-lurkers who take aspects of one's bio that are not major markers of one's accomplishments and turn them into signature events in that person's life", and proposes, "Now, please consider changing the rules a bit further, so living persons have complete control over what is posted on their bio pages."[fr 20] In contrast, Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet, who states, "I had a personal run-in with a Wikibully. Someone who didn’t care for me tore my reputation on Wikipedia to shreds", also asserts, "Like the Internet itself, like open source itself, Wikipedia is growing up. This is something to be celebrated. Regardless of what happens to your personal page."[fr 21]
The Register, which has over the years carved out a niche in sardonic criticism of Wikipedia, ended their article on a cautionary note: "A warning to celebrities: under the new policy of moderating articles of living people, fledgling Wikifiddlers can still tamper with your article—only now they have kill you [sic] first."[fr 22] Meanwhile, the Mail Online broke new ground with its assertions, "Wikipedia has been forced to abandon its policy of allowing anyone to edit its pages. An army of 20,000 unpaid 'expert editors' will be drafted in to check all changes to articles on living people before the pages go online. The move is a response to the hijacking of the site by those with political or personal motives", though this writer lamentably failed to identify the sourcing for the new claims.
Some non-Foundation Wikipedians appeared:
Coverage became more accurate as the week progressed. Four days after the New York Times piece, Public Radio International's The World made no mention of BLPs, instead featuring a BBC-conducted interview of Wales, who appeared to be describing the approved flagged protection proposal. Describing the current cutoff for autoconfirmed users at four days, Wales stated he foresaw the number of editors whose edits would immediately go live and who could review other's edits as being in the tens or hundreds of thousands.[fr 25]
A poll has been started to reach consensus on the criteria for the new reviewer usergroup. While the flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal was approved in general, the specifics of who would have reviewer rights was left for later discussion.
The media coverage prompted discussion at AN and Wikipedia talk:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions on how the Foundation could better inform the community of developments so they aren't informed by the external media. No consensus had been reached at the time this issue went to press.
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The current "flagged protection and patrolled revisions" trial has a long history under various names. The concept originated in the supposition that users should be able to rate particular article revisions, and was thus closely linked with the rating system now found on article discussion pages at its early inception. This was quickly followed by the idea that highly rated revisions should be prioritized for the viewer in some way. The variant before the recent approved proposal was referred to as "flagged revisions", while "stable versions", "article validation", "page validation", "article rating" and "Wikipedia 1.0" are all terms used for the idea of vetting particular article revisions.
According to a March 2005 article in this newspaper, User:Magnus Manske announced MediaWiki 1.5 would likely have "the first implementation of a feature for use in rating or validating articles", with one editor responding, "Wikipedia 1.0 is starting to look less and less like vaporware." However, The Signpost writer notes,
In its preliminary stages, however, such a feature is likely to remain somewhat in the background. Besides the issue of whether and how it works in a purely technical sense, a rating system would benefit from testing in social terms, by seeing how Wikipedia contributors interact with it. As a result, the initial use of an article rating feature will probably be purely for gathering data, and evaluating whether the end product actually makes sense.
A May 2005 article notes software requests for a "page-ranking feature, where users can indicate how accurate and complete they have found an article. Magnus Manske has developed a page validation feature, and developers hope to incorporate it into a putative MediaWiki 1.6 release later this year." However, the feature remained problematic. In August 2005, User:Jimbo Wales was forced to issue a clarification after a garbled translation in a discussion about Wikipedia:Pushing to 1.0 in German language media "in which he was quoted as saying that Wikipedia planned to 'freeze' the content of pages once they reached a state of 'undisputed' quality". This newspaper noted that the
article rating feature designed by Magnus Manske is still on hold. David Gerard, who has been active in pushing for it, reports that implementing the current code "would bring the wiki to a screeching overloaded halt". As a result, further improvement is needed before the feature could even be considered ready for a trial run.
In December 2005, this newspaper reported, "Article validation is set to be enabled on Wikipedia 'very soon', according to David Gerard. Currently, Brion is 'cleaning it up' for usage." Later that month, a poll approved semi-protection with Jimbo once again attempting to calm fevered media coverage in a post stating, "This is one of many changes to the software which are coming soon, including the ability to put pages into a 'validated' state (better name should be determined) and so on." [frb 1] The Signpost reported semi-protection as "part of the broader effort to add quality-related features to Wikipedia, such as article ratings and stable versions of articles". Looking back over the year, this newspaper summed up these developments as "new measures were taken toward article validation, although no such feature has been implemented yet"
In a February 2006 Signpost interview of Jimbo, he asserted,
We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.
In July 2006 and in the continued lack of dedicated software features, Gmaxwell proposed Wikipedia:Stable versions now. The proposal involved moving articles into a development subpage until a version that "must contain no obvious factual, grammatical, or typographical errors and must contain at least some level of referencing" is generated. At that point the development version would have been moved to the actual article title and protected. Despite some enthusiastic supporters, the extra responsibility this proposal put upon administrators proved to be a sticking point and the proposal failed to gain consensus support.
At Wikimania in August 2006, Brion Vibber gave a presentation announcing stable versioning likely "in one to three months". This newspaper reported,
Vibber suggested different ways that stable versioning could be used, including a short delay before changes appear, or explicit approval, in order to reduce the impact of vandalism. Experiments will be conducted on the German Wikipedia, from which a formal stable versioning policy may be adopted. Possible uses for stable versioning include the marking of stable versions for semi-permanent display, marking reviewed versions to aid in publishing Wikipedia articles, and allowing editing on protected articles while publicly showing the stable or reviewed version.
Board of Trustees member Erik Möller (User:Eloquence), in response to an October 2006 interview question on how to get the scientific community involved with Wikipedia stated,
I want us to have a focused discussion to define very precisely what functionality we will implement to identify "stable" versions of articles. Solving the well-known problem that we don't distinguish between an unreviewed edit from 5 minutes ago and an article that has grown over 5 years should be pretty high on our agenda to gain credibility with academia, I think.
That same month, a German media outlet first reported on the planned adoption of a flagging system by German Wikipedia, though Wales cautioned that the details of the implementation had not yet been worked out. User:Michael Snow wrote a December 2006 article examining the ramifications of the Siegenthaler incident and noting,
One step taken in the aftermath, on December 5, was removing the ability of unregistered editors to create new encyclopedia articles, such as had been done in Seigenthaler's case. This was characterized as an experiment but has remained in place since that time, although it is unclear how successful this was. The issue was recently raised again on the English Wikipedia mailing list, and Wales stated his opinion that the experiment "did not achieve the intended effect". He suggested that the restriction should be changed when the planned feature to flag "stable" or "non-vandalized" versions of articles is available.
This feature is supposed to be tested initially on the German Wikipedia, and was discussed at Wikimania, but is not yet ready for implementation. What to call flagged revisions remains a matter of debate, but the ability to flag an article version is expected to be widely distributed. One possibility is after a small number of edits or a brief waiting period such as the time needed to edit semi-protected articles.
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
Little was heard about the stable version features for several months though this newspaper noted in April 2007: "A huge amount of work was done on Flagged Revisions and ConfirmEdit ... although neither are enabled on the English Wikipedia." mw:Extension:FlaggedRevs had been started in late March 2007 though it took some time for the term "Flagged Revisions" to overtake in usage the previously used terms.
Jimbo Wales gave another interview in September 2007, including on several related topics:
WS: Gwern asks, "When anonymous page creation was forbidden, it was said that there would be a study of its effects. That was a very long time ago. Was any type of formal study ever done? If it was, when will it be released? Have you considered allowing anonymous page creation again?"
JW: I am unaware of any formal study. My own feeling is that anonymous page creation should be re-enabled when the stable versions feature is available. I do not consider the experiment to be a success or a failure. It seems to have had very little impact on anything, all things considered.
WS: Ta bu shi da yu asks, "A number of attempts at setting up a way of marking stable versions have been proposed, and at least one MediaWiki extension has been created. None of these proposals have taken off, and it looks like the extension has stagnated. What's your opinion on stable versioning? How do you personally think it should be used – as a default when available for anonymous users, or as an optional view?"
JW: What I support with stable versions is that whatever it is, it is the default view for anonymous visitors, but that it should be used sparingly, not on all articles; that it needs to be a "state" that an article is in, like semi-protection, but more open.
As a sidenote to coverage about a proposed lifting of the restriction against anonymous page creation, this newspaper noted in October 2007, "Some people have looked to the introduction of a MediaWiki feature for stable versions or flagged revisions as a step that would allow article creation to be reopened. However, ... progress in developing that feature remains unclear (a planned test on the German Wikipedia has yet to begin). The occasion did prompt some renewed debate about which version, stable or live, should be displayed as the default."
Not until May 2008 was there significant progress, when German Wikipedia introduced "sighted revisions", a feature made possible through the extension FlaggedRevs in which "any page with a 'sighted revision' shows the sighted revision by default to non-logged-in users; logged-in users, by default, view the most recent revision, whether it has been sighted or not." The Signpost noted,
The German Wikipedia is acting as the testing ground for this feature, as that community has been very vocal in their support of such a feature. It is expected that their experiences will affect how the English Wikipedia uses the feature. Testing there is expected to last for several weeks at the least before it is enabled here.
The FlaggedRevs extension is customizable, and the Wikipedia community considered proposals that fell under Wikipedia:Flagged revisions, namely sighted versions and quality versions, the latter of which would take precedence over sighted version flagging. This newspaper reported, "At least on the English Wikipedia, the entire process is proposed, with details still to be hammered out on many important issues. However, with the German community embracing flagged revisions, it is likely that the feature will be enabled on the English Wikipedia within the next few months."
The English Wikipedia community continued to discuss possible implementation of some kind of configuration of FlaggedRevs, while German Wikipedians issued a report of their experiences in December 2008.
In a poll that began on 2 January 2009, proponents of flagged revisions proposed a variety of different trials they wanted permission to carry out. The poll ended three weeks later with 59.7% in support, with this newspaper reporting, "Many opposed the extension in principle, as a contrary to the 'anyone can edit' spirit of Wikipedia. Another significant portion of those opposed were concerned about the particular proposed implementation, and editors are still working to forge a compromise on the details of the trial to satisfy that group." The dispute grew emotional, with several editors threatening to leave the project over the issue. Specific concerns of editors who opposed include that the proposal was not for a specific trial, was vaguely worded, or would appear to create a large backlog of "unsighted" revisions. The three-fifths split was important as Erik Möller, who was now the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, had previously stated that "a very large majority, at least two thirds, is generally necessary".
As The Signpost reported, things grew more dramatic when, at the unsuccessful close of the poll,
Jimbo Wales asked the Wikimedia Foundation to turn on Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia on his "personal recommendation"... Wales' interpretation of the poll is limited to a technical request to the developers to turn the extension on, and place control of the extension in the hands of the project's bureaucrats. Thus, the proposal does not detail what pages will have flagged revisions enabled, just a code change in the site's configuration file. Some proposed trials are detailed here, but were not a part of the poll. As a result, it remains to be decided how the community will proceed if Wales' request is granted. Brion Vibber, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Technical Officer, stated on Jimbo's talk page that Flagged Revisions would not be enabled by the foundation "before working out some very specific parameters for the test first".
This prompted a request for arbitration to decide if Wales had the authority to close a poll in his own favor, Wales having expressed strong support for Flagged Revisions on several occasions, that was unanimously declined by the Arbitration Committee.
There was further coverage of German Wikipedia, which was reported to have done an initial "sighting" of 97% of its articles. In mid-February 2009, German Wikipedia announced that it had completed sighting every article.
In early March 2009, this newspaper wrote, "Although discussions about potential trials of the flagged revisions extension have essentially ground to a halt, Jimbo Wales has indicated on his talk page that he is "shopping a very premature proposal around", with "[n]ews to come soon".
In mid-March, a two-week poll was started on a new proposal: Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions. Unlike the January proposal, which was criticized for covering a variety of different trials and being overly vague and generally applied, this proposed a two-month trial of a specific configuration of mw:Extension:FlaggedRevs:
On the issue of biographies of living people, discussions have demonstrated the need to improve monitoring of these articles, and that flagging systems could help us to do so. But there is no consensus to use an active implementation (in which new edits are not shown to readers unless made by or flagged by trusted users) for all biographies of living people or an arbitrary subset of them, preemptively. Thus, it is proposed to enable patrolled revisions, which uses a passive flag that reviewers can use to mark a revision patrolled, for monitoring purposes, but that has no effect on the version viewed by readers. This passive flag is available for all articles. Flagged protection is a proposal to allow administrators to enable an active flag on a given article, 'flag protecting' it. Reviewers can flag revisions, and the version viewed by readers by default on (semi) flagged protected pages is the latest confirmed revision. During the trial, semi flagged protection is intended to be used with the same requirements as for semi-protection, and full flagged protection (see below), with the same requirements as for full-protection.
This restriction was well understood by editors in the poll that ended on 1 April, whose comments in support included:
The Signpost noted, "In addition to those who oppose any form of flagged revisions, the proposal has been opposed by some who argue that it is essentially toothless with regard to biographies of living people. It is yet to be seen whether Jimmy Wales will present his own compromise proposal to apply some form of flagged revisions to such biographies, as he indicated he would before the current proposal gained momentum." The poll ended with 259 in support, 61 in opposition and 4 declared neutral, for a 79.9% support percentage.
In May, Vibber gave an update on the technical aspects of flagged protection and patrolled revisions, stating "Yes, we do plan to roll out an English Wikipedia test setup for Flagged Revs." and "There's not yet a fixed schedule for it, but I'd like to see it up and running in production before Wikimania. :) [August]"
The next update came on the Wikimedia Tech blog on 23 August 2009, which stated, "A few highlights from the last week… Test wikis with Flagged Revisions and ReaderFeedback configurations have been set up to shake down UI and workflow before we prepare to deploy these extensions on English Wikipedia in the coming weeks. The test sites have been populated with featured articles, and should be getting some decent front pages soon. ;)" This post apparently was the catalyst for the subsequent media firestorm. (See full Signpost coverage.)
Wikimania 2009 was held during 26–28 August 2009, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Videos of Wikimania presentations are available on Wikimedia Commons, including the keynotes, the many scheduled panels, and the lightning talks, and Richard Stallman's speech from Tuesday, before the conference started. The full schedule provides video links to most of the talks and sessions from the first two days of Wikimania, while most of the videos from the third day are not yet linked but can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
Presentations that generated considerable online discussion include:
In addition to a chaotic stream of microblogging on Twitter and identi.ca, much of which carried the hashtag #wikimania, participants produced a number of blog posts and other coverage of Wikimania 2009:
Less coverage appeared about the final day of Wikimania than for the first two days, perhaps because of the all-night Wikimania party that followed the official end of the conference.
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The Wikimedia Foundation announced a new addition to the Board of Trustees on 25 August: Matt Halprin, a partner of the philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network and former eBay executive. Also that day came news that Omidyar Network is making an unrestricted $2 million grant to the Wikimedia Foundation (see Wikimedia press release). Omidyar Network, a hybrid non-profit and limited liability company (LLC) created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, describes itself as "dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. We invest in and help scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic, social, and political change." Through its LLC component, Omidyar Network has invested in a number of social media companies, including a $4 million investment in Wikia, the for-profit wiki company co-founded by Jimmy Wales. Through its non-profit component, it has awarded grants to Sunlight Foundation, DonorsChoose.org, and Creative Commons, among other non-profit organizations.
Following the news of the grant and Halprin's appointment to the Wikimedia board, a number of Wikimedians expressed concern over the appearance that a seat on the board had been purchased. In a podcast interview with Halprin at Wikimania, Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) inquired about the connection between the grant and the board seat (see partial transcript). According to Halprin, the grant is not directly tied to the board seat, and while the Omidyar Network prefers to place its partners on the boards of organizations it provides financial support to, the decision to put Halprin on the board was based on his relevant expertise.
A Q & A released by the Wikimedia Foundation notes that while the grant is unrestricted in how it can be used, full funding is dependent on meeting several objectives:
The support is conditional on Wikimedia making progress towards its core objectives. Wikimedia has pledged to Omidyar Network to report progress in four key areas: financial sustainability, global reach, global participation rates, and the completion of Wikimedia's strategic planning process. Wikimedia and Omidyar have developed targets related to financial sustainability (the percentage of operating expenses supported by individual donations), global reach (global unique visitors monthly, as reported by comScore Media Metrix), global participation rates (defined as the number of editors with 5+ edits in the previous month) and the completion of the Wikimedia Foundation's strategy project.
The Wikimedia Foundation has not yet revealed the specific targets for percentage of funding from individual donors, global reach, or global participation rate.
Two new members have joined the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, while one was formally welcomed. The new members are Samuel Klein, who was recently elected by the community; and Matt Halprin, who was announced at the Wikimania press conference. Arne Klempert, who was chosen for one of the two chapter-appointed seats this year, was also formally welcomed. Domas Mituzas, who had been on the board since 2008, stepped down.
New board officers were also chosen at the recent Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees meeting during Wikimania. Michael Snow will continue to serve as chair and Jan-Bart de Vreede will continue as board Vice Chair. Kat Walsh is becoming board executive secretary, while Stuart West continues as board treasurer.
Wired reports that the WikiTrust MediaWiki extension for evaluating the trustworthiness of text within Wikipedia articles may be deployed on English Wikipedia over the next few months. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led by Luca de Alfaro, have been developing the WikiTrust software since 2007; they created a WikiTrust demonstration in late 2007 (no longer available) based on a dump of English Wikipedia.
The extension works by determining the origin of each segment of text within an article and calculating a trust value based on the reputation of the editor who added it and the reputations of editors who subsequently edited the article without removing the text. Authors' reputations are based on how much stable content they have added and how rarely their contributions are reverted. The extension is deployed on the WikiTrust wiki; the trust features are accessible through the "check text" tab. The WikiTrust team has also developed an experimental Firefox add-on that adds a trust tab at the top of article pages.
On a mailing list discussion, Brion Vibber confirmed that plans to eventually deploy WikiTrust are in the works:
We've been planning to get a test setup together since conversations at the Berlin developer meetup in April, but actual implementation of it is pending coordination with Luca and his team. My understanding is that work has proceeded pretty well on setting it up to be able to fetch page history data more cleanly internally, which was a prerequisite, so we're hoping to get that going this fall.
Erik Möller offered further clarification:
We're very interested in WikiTrust, primarily for two reasons:
- it allows us to create blamemaps for history pages, so that you can quickly see who added a specific piece of text. This is very interesting for anyone who's ever tried to navigate a long version history to find out who added something.
- it potentially allows us to come up with an algorithmic "best recent revision" guess. This is very useful for offline exports.
The trust coloring is clearly the most controversial part of the technology. However, it's also integral to it, and we think it could be valuable. If we do integrate it, it would likely be initially as a user preference. (And of course no view of the article would have it toggled on by default.) There may also be additional community consultation required.
Any integration is contingent on the readiness of the technology. It seems to have matured over the last couple of years, and we're planning to meet with Luca soon to review the current state of things. There's no fixed deployment roadmap yet, and the deployment of FlaggedRevs is our #1 priority.
Reaction from The Armenian Weekly followed on the 31 August. Shahan Kandaharian characterised the Azerbaijan piece as an "information war", asserting that while "not officially announced, this incursion of misinformation carries all the convincing ingredients that it enjoys the auspices and support of the Turkish state." [war 2] Kandaharian went on to ask readers to"We call on all Azerbaijani citizens and those who are aware of the truth to correct the mistakes related to Azerbaijan’s history, geography, Karabakh conflict and traditions."[war 1]
"take part in this information-misinformation war. Wikipedia, or any self-respecting open encyclopedia, must finally realize that there’s the need of maintaining a certain level of credibility. And no matter how active the Azeri information incursion is, information must not be replaced by mis-information."[war 2]
According to the two pieces, articles containing disputed information could include Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh, the featured article Nagorno-Karabakh War and Armenia. The editing history of these articles appears to indicate no outbreak of this war as yet, although the article on Armenia has been semi-protected since 19 May 2007.
After Brion Vibber's post on the Wikimedia Tech blog last week that alluded to plans to implement the FlaggedRevs extension on English Wikipedia, a story by Noam Cohen of the New York Times set off an intense cycle of coverage in English media across the globe. Despite reports that implied otherwise, Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions is still the current plan for a two-month trial, with the decision whether and how to continue using FlaggedRevs to be decided by the Wikipedia community at the end of the trial.
See full Signpost coverage of the recent media coverage, and community and Wikimedia Foundation responses and the history of flagged revisions over earlier months and years.
As in previous years, New York Times journalist Noam Cohen—who reports on Wikipedia frequently—attended Wikimania and dispatched a series of posts about the event to the Times' Bits Blog. Cohen covered Richard Stallman's thoughts on Wikipedia before the conference began, Stallman's controversial keynote speech on the first day, and the panel discussion about English Wikipedia's decline in editing activity and slowdown in article growth in recent years. (For more on Wikimania 2009, see Signpost coverage.)
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The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.
User:SandyGeorgia felt that"there should be some policy on what constitutes an acceptable length for an article's lead".
User:SlimVirgin wanted editors to be able to argue on a case-by-case basis rather than in reference to rules:"THis looks like an attempt to turn a guideline into a hard-and-fast rule via instruction creep; we do not need hard and fast character counts in a guildeline. I oppose this whole thing; it's a guideline. [sic]"
User:David Fuchs commented'I would like to see people argue, "This lead is too long because it contains this, and this, and this, and these are not key issues. I don't want to see anyone argue, "This lead is too long because it's 1,000 characters over the guideline limit."'
User:Ottava Rima offered that'I haven't seen any indications that we suffer a crisis from not having a set of arbitrary bright line "recommendations"'
"common grammar school education (at least, when there was such a thing) use to say that a paragraph was 5 to 10 sentences. As such, no article should really have over 40 sentences in their lead."
User:King of Hearts opened a request for comment on 14 August:
While User:Rspeer put the case for keeping such content in the face of no consensus:"According to WP:NFCC, the burden of proof is on "users seeking to include or retain content"; this implies that no consensus closes for fair-use images default to delete. However, according to precedent (e.g. Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 June 22#File:CherryCokeBottle.jpg, Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 April 18#WbNORTHstand_gallery_470x313.jpg, among many others), no consensus closes for fair-use images default to keep. Question: What should no consensus closes default to?"
Anonymous editor User:81.110.104.91 countered:"The proposal to take an action based on the lack of consensus -- something which goes against the entire idea of how consensus works -- gives considerable weight to anyone who is willing to destroy consensus. It gives no weight whatsoever to the policy, because the only way that Wikipedia policies work is through a consensus of editors on what they say and what they mean. You would create the opposite situation, where the way to make things happen would be to disagree. That is insane."
"That isn't what the policy behind it says. Policy makes it clear that there should be a clear consensus to use NFC in a given context, and the onus is very much on those seeking to use it to justify it. The process should reflect this. Articles, templates, etc. are all entirely free content, hence this doesn't apply, so we ask for a clear consensus to delete. For non-free content at FFD, the process must ask for a clear consensus to keep the image, otherwise the NFCC are rendered toothless. It would also make administrators think more carefully about closing contentious discussions, rather than simply closing them for the sake of it."
Due to usability and accessibility concerns, User:Cacycle has been working on improvements to {{Navbox}} at User:Cacycle/navbox demo. Most of the discussion regarding the changes has focussed on the positioning of an arrow meant to indicate the ability to show or hide information. Cacycle noted that:
"When using a wide window on a higher-res screen the show/hide buttons would be out of the context of the text or title."
More feedback regarding the changes is welcome, although there are currently compatibility issues with some versions of Internet Explorer at the present time:
"just figured out that MS-IE 8 in MS-IE 7 mode does not support :before and therefore does not display the arrows"
A round up of polls spotted by your writer in the last seven days or so, bearing in mind of course that voting is evil. You can suggest a poll for inclusion, preferably including details as to how the poll will be closed and implemented, either on the tip line or by directly editing the next issue.
Your writer has trawled the deletion debates opened and closed in the last week and presents these debates for your edification. Either they generated larger than average response, centred on policy in an illuminating way, or otherwise just jumped out as of interest. Feel free to suggest interesting deletion debates for future editions here.
24 Requests for comment have been made in the week 24–30 August:
Five editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Chamal N (nom), NuclearWarfare (nom), Sky Harbor (nom), Maedin (nom) and Beeblebrox (nom).
Two articles were promoted to featured status this week: Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins (nom) and Nicolo Giraud (nom).
Fourteen lists were promoted to featured status this week: CMLL World Mini-Estrella Championship (nom), Michael Jackson videography (nom), Lostprophets discography (nom), List of Chicago Cubs managers (nom), List of Dexter episodes (nom), List of tallest buildings in Mobile (nom), List of Men's World Ice Hockey Championship players for Canada (1977–present) (nom), List of Last Exile episodes (nom), List of The Legend of Zelda media (nom), List of tallest buildings in Bucharest (nom), 2007 NBA Draft (nom), List of Denver Broncos first-round draft picks (nom), CMLL World Women's Championship (nom) and List of Gold Glove Award winners at pitcher (nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status this week: True Blue (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Atmosphere of Jupiter, Natalie Clifford Barney, Alice in Chains, Samlesbury witches, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Harriet Bosse and Oxygen toxicity.
No articles were delisted this week.
Five lists were delisted this week: List of awards and nominations received by Gwen Stefani (nom), List of Vancouver Canucks captains (nom), List of Desperate Housewives episodes (nom), List of Portuguese monarchs (nom) and List of Teen Titans episodes (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Liberation of Paris, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, White-faced Heron, NGC 2207 and IC 2163, Gazania rigens and Pamukkale.
Two featured sounds were promoted this week:
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| Himmler - Posen speech | (nom) |
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| 1890 – "America", read by Walt Whitman | (nom) |
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Seven pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
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The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving four cases open.
An arbitration request concerning the deletion of the "Ra (channeled entity)" article was filed by Logos5557 and quickly rejected by the Committee as both premature and essentially a content dispute.
The Noloop case entered its second week of deliberations. The case involves mutual allegations of disruptive conduct by several parties, and is expected to address the conduct of all the editors involved. Evidence has been presented by several editors, and one of the parties, Noloop, has posted a statement that he does not intend to participate in the proceeding. A draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Carcharoth, is expected by 6 September.
The Lapsed Pacifist 2 case also entered its second week of deliberations. The filing editor, Steve Crossin, alleges that Lapsed Pacifist has engaged in advocacy, original research, and edit warring, as well as various other improprieties, over a wide range of articles. Lapsed Pacifist has so far refused to enter a statement or respond to the allegations, and a temporary injunction prohibits him from editing articles related to the Corrib gas project for the duration of the case. No arbitrators have commented on the evidence or workshop proposals at this time; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, is expected by 1 September.
The 194x144x90x118 case entered its third week of deliberations and its first week of formal voting. The filing editor, Erik9, alleges that 194x144x90x118 has engaged in a variety of disruptive conduct, despite an RFC on the matter; 194x144x90x118 has refused to respond to the allegations, calling the proceedings a "sham".
The proposed decision, prepared by arbitrator Wizardman, would condemn 194x144x90x118 for "soapboxing on talk pages, personal attacks, edit warring, and a lack of a desire to abide by policy" and ban him for one year; the proposals have, at this point, unanimous support from all voting arbitrators.
The Abd-William M. Connolley case entered its seventh week of deliberations and its second week of formal voting. The case was filed by Abd, who alleged that William M. Connolley had improperly banned him from the cold fusion article; William M. Connolley denied these allegations, and stated that Abd's conduct had been inappropriate.
The proposed decision, prepared by arbitrator Stephen Bain, would place the cold fusion article under discretionary sanctions, remove William M. Connolley's administrator status, place Abd under mentorship, and issue several admonishments and reminders. Alternative proposals have been presented by arbitrator FloNight, who would only remove William M. Connolley's administrator status for three months, but also impose several restrictions on his use of administrative tools following their restoration; by arbitrator Coren, who would place William M. Connolley under administrative probation; and by arbitrator Casliber, who would replace Abd's mentorship with a series of editing restrictions and ban him for a period of four weeks. Voting on most remedy proposals remains deeply split.
Arbitrator Risker has proposed a motion to rescind the six-month ban levied against Locke Cole as part of the Date delinking decision; the motion provides for a reinstatement of the ban should Locke Cole be blocked for edit-warring. The motion currently stands at six arbitrators supporting, one opposing, and two recused; the majority necessary for adoption has not been announced.
The Committee has enacted a motion in response to Wikidemon's request to amend the Obama articles decision. The motion extends ChildofMidnight's topic ban to include related discussions in all namespaces. Considerable heated discussion has followed the motion's announcement.
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This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.3 (b4aac1f), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
Wikimania 2009 included a technical track of presentations, along with a Codeathon event that took place the day before the conference and continued during the conference. The first day of the conference included an overview of Wikimedia servers and infrastructure by Rob Halsell. During his talk, he discussed plans for adding Wikimedia servers at a facility in northern Virginia, which is an area less prone to hurricanes and has other advantages. Daniel Kinzler gave an overview of how the toolserver works.
Naoko Komura gave an update on the Wikimedia Usability Initiative. From the usability tests done in the Spring, the usability team identified various improvements that could be made to the interface, and classified them as simple to difficult to achieve, and small to large impact. So far, the team has focused on implementing the simple improvements that can make a big impact. More difficult improvements like wysiwyg editing might be addressed in the future. She also briefly discussed the Multimedia Usability Project, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, that is aimed at improving the experience for users uploading images and other media to Wikimedia Commons and other usability improvements for Commons.
Komura discussed the release schedule for features, including the Acai release that is currently available for beta testing (with the Vector skin and new editing toolbar). The Babacao release will be next, and will include an updated color scheme that retains key things like the red and blue links but in more subtle shades of color. Babacao will also include changes to the editing interface, placing the table of contents on the edit page, to the right of the edit box in a tabbed panel; the other tab would have an editing cheatsheet and help information. An insert table wizard and Michael Dale's add media wizard will also be available for beta testing. Further down the road is the Citron release, which will include content folding features to collapse things like infobox markup, and will include side-by-side preview capabilities. The Usability Initiative includes provisions for additional usability testing of the new features.
Angela Beesley gave a brief overview of usability improvements being made on Wikia, including a prototype wysiwyg editor. She then led discussion on usability, which included questions for both Beesley and Komura. During the session, Andrew Garrett gave a demo of Liquid Threads, which is aimed at improving usability of talk pages.
Erik Möller, Shay David, and Michael Dale presented in a session on collaborative and open video. They discussed efforts underway to standardize video with HTML5, including new <video> and <audio> tags. Wikimedia is working, with support from Kaltura and Mozilla, to implement an HTML5 video player and other technology that is completely open source. Michael Dale has also been working on the Firefogg extension for Firefox, which allows uploading videos in chunks, which is helpful when one's internet connection breaks. Firefogg also allows uploading videos in proprietary formats such as MPEG and have them converted to the open source ogg format. Dale also talked about the new upload API, which provide support on the Wikimedia and MediaWiki back-end to support features available in Firefogg, such as chunk uploading. Dale also demoed the add media wizard, which would be available in the editing toolbar and simplifies the process of finding media files on Wikimedia Commons or uploading new files. Dale is also working on collaborative video editing features, including sequence editing, which may be implemented further in the future.
Other technical topics that were presented at Wikimania include DBpedia, the Book tool, MediaWiki bot API, MediaWiki testing, OpenStreetMap integration, translatewiki.net, Semantic MediaWiki, WikiWord, and MediaWiki search. Video of Wikimania presentations are available on Wikimedia Commons.
During the Codeathon, developers worked on code review and preparing to update code on Wikimedia sites, which is imminent in the next week. Work was also done on Michael Dale's new upload branch, and improved JavaScript handling with jQuery. When the next code update occurs, this will include the new upload API, which supports chunk uploading with Firefogg and there will be the ability to upload files by url (e.g. from the Internet Archive).
Developers also worked on plans for a configuration database, which could replace LocalSettings.php and other configuration files currently used. Production servers (in Amsterdam) for the OpenStreetMap-Wikipedia integration project were also setup, and funds are budgeted for additional mapping servers to be located in Florida. On the last day of Wikimania, Brion Vibber provided a summary of the codeathon.
Two bot tasks were approved this week. DrilBot 4 was approved to implement the previously agreed deprecation of "future" templates (e.g. {{Future film}}) and SmackBot XVI to tidy up redirect syntax for enhanced interoperability with other tools and bots.
list=search is now marked as an expensive query, with lower limits. (r55615)
