Flagged Revisions

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This is an archived version of this page, as edited by Leinad (talk | contribs) at 17:22, 7 December 2009 (→‎Flagged Revisions on Wikimedia projects: +pl.wikt). It may differ significantly from the current version.

FlaggedRevs (Flagged Revisions) is an extension of MediaWiki that allows one to flag versions of articles and thus give additional information about quality. This comes with the possibility of changing what an IP sees by default. The technical description can be found at mw:Extension:FlaggedRevs. Here, we will describe how the concept is used in the test on the German wikipedia and what it is good for.

First of all, there are two types of flags: Sighted and Quality. These come with two new user groups: An editor is able to flag versions as sighted, a reviewer is able to flag as quality.

Sighted means that an article has been looked at and does not contain vandalism. Quality means that a real content check has been done. Because the first check is not a big thing, any admin can give editor rights and there is an automatic process for giving this right. Currently, if you have edited for two months and did 200 edits in the main namespace, then you can get the editor right. The quality flag is much more restrictive and thus only bureaucrats can give this right.

What do flagged revisions accomplish?

  1. Flagged revisions give the reader an indication of the quality of the article.
  2. They assure a basic article quality (someone with basic trust has written this or checked it), if the last sighted version is shown to the reader.
  3. If only the last sighted revision is shown to the reader, they make vandalism less attractive.
  4. Generally, they provide a powerful tool for the control of new edits and patrolling the recent changes becomes more efficient:
    A new edit has to be checked for vandalism only once.
    Multiple edits in a row can be checked.
    If an article was vandalized and subsequently edited by a trusted user, vandalism was often hidden. This is no longer possible.
    No edit is forgotten.
    More people are able to find edits that were not sighted yet.
    Combined with categories, this becomes really powerful, since wikiprojects/portals have the possibility to oversee their whole area for new edits.
  5. They provide a useful system of revision labeling in general, sophisticating the information readers and contributors can derive from the history and about the article.

Flagged Revisions on Wikimedia projects

Flagged Revisions has been requested on numerous Wikimedia wikis, but implemented on only a few of them. At automatic list of requests to enable the extension at Wikimedia projects may be found at Bugzilla (includes both current and old requests).

Not yet enabled:

Rejected

  • Wikipedia
    • French - survey done October 2009.

Wikis that want to request custom implementation of the feature can use these Bugzilla requests as models for their own requests.

Reputability achievements

After enabling FlaggedRevs, the English Wikinews became reliable enough for Google to include Wikinews contents in Google News for example.

Interim reports

See also

External links

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