Confused About Wikipedia's Flagged Revisions? What's Really Happening
Over the last few days, we have read a lot about how Wikipedia's new 'flagged revision' policy will radically change how entries about living persons will be maintained. Even mainstream media organizations like CNN have now picked up on this story, though there seems to be some confusion about the extent to which these new policies, once implemented, will change the nature of Wikipedia. According to some of these reports, Wikipedia will cease to be free and open. Instead, a group of editors with dictatorial powers will patrol the site. The reality, however, is far less dramatic.
First of all, it is important to realize what 'flagged revisions' really are. As Nihiltres, an anonymous Wikipedia volunteer and editor points out, FlaggedRevs is simply an extension of the Media Wiki software, the open-source project that Wikipedia runs on. It is also important to keep in mind that these changes would only apply to articles about living persons.
Update: according to a clarification on the Wikimedia blog, the latest proposal would not just protect articles about living persons. Instead, Wikipedia would flag all articles "that are currently under normal mechanisms of protection (where new and unregistered users cannot edit) to be eligible for the new protection model, which allows for more open editing."
Flagged Protections and Patrolled Revisions
The current plan is to use this extension to institute a system Wikipedia calls 'flagged protections.' Posts that are flagged as 'protected' can still be edited by any user, but only certain users will actually be able to mark a certain revision as acceptable and allow it to appear on the main version of the entry.
In addition, Wikipedia will institute something called 'patrolled revisions.' While this sounds dramatic, all this feature would do is simply mark a certain version of a Wikipedia entry as reviewed. Thanks to this, it would become easier to compare a reviewed version against later edits, which should help Wikipedia editors to detect and weed out vandalism. These patrolled revisions have no influence over what regular users will see on the site.
As is typical for large changes to Wikipedia, administrators, editors, and users have been discussing the specifics of these changes for the last couple of months, and it is still not clear what the final result will look like. A test version of Wikipedia that uses the Flagged Revision extension is already live, though it's not clear when and if these changes will go live on the main site.
Pros and Cons
There are a number of pros and cons to implementing the proposed changes. On the one hand, this will most likely make vandalism less of a problem on the site. On the other hand, however, as Nihiltres also notes, the result of using Flagged Revisions could be a large backlog of edits.
Some have argued, however, that thanks to this new feature, Wikipedia's editors wouldn't have to completely lock down edits on some controversial articles anymore. Instead, users could still make edits to these articles and those edits would just have to be reviewed before they go live on the site.
Overall, this doesn't sound like a bad proposal. It doesn't really change the nature of Wikipedia, but it does acknowledge some of the issues that an open site of this size inevitably faces and proposes a reasonable solution.
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I am so against flagged revision. However, what I've understood of patrolled revision seem to be good.
Flagged revision is not the solution to the problem wikipedia is facing with vandalism. It creates other problems.
Thank you very much for posting this. I only hope that some of the confusion can be cleared up.
I understand the need to have some control over Wikipedia, but vandalism is vandalism. Whether it's done to the entry on Michael Jackson or the entry of a Salamander, it makes no difference.
It's an interesting double-standard that I don't think make much sense.
Bryan
JokeyPhone.com
RT @fredericl: tried to explain Wikipedia's "flagged revisions" policy in my last RWW post: http://www.shrty.us/flre [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3561914194]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 26, 2009 1:30 PM
...According to some of these reports, Wikipedia will cease to be free and open...
I'm surprices to hear that.. In my opinion Wikipedia's very attractiv efeature is that it's open for everybody who want to contribute.
Anyway hope it will continue to be very good source of information.
Your update is still not quite right in its phrase "the latest proposal would not just protect articles about living persons." The proposal explicitly states, "there is no consensus to use an active implementation for all biographies of living people or an arbitrary subset of them, preemptively." In other words and simplifying, flagged protection, in which readers who are not logged into the site will not see new changes until they are approved by someone more established, will occur only on pages where those readers are currently entirely prohibited from editing through the current protection tools.
However, the linked proposal of "patrolled revisions" can be done for any article, where an established editor can vouch for a particular revision. A reader visiting that site will still see the most recent revision, even if it's vandalized or otherwise in worse shape than before, but will be informed that there is a "patrolled revision" in the history that he or she can look at instead of the current one.
So there is no "all biographies of living people will be put under flagged protection" proposal that has been approved by the English Wikipedia community, and never has been, despite about 500 media outlets saying otherwise right now. Your article here is the closest to describing the actual approved proposal of all of them, which is just sad.
Thanks for the update BT. I guess it's important to remember that this is still all very much in flux. My update was based on the info in the Wikimedia blog post, but I gather that this only reflects one direction of where this could go in the end.