Topic on Project:Village Pump

Replace full protection with FlaggedRevs

12
Summary by Jdforrester (WMF)

A proposal to replace protection with FlaggedRevs, discarded now that FlaggedRevs has been removed from MW.org.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Some pages that are currently fully protected could benefit from a less rigid protection scheme using Flagged Revisions, allowing more editors to suggest edits without risking having highly visible pages contain potential gibberish. I propose changing the fully protected pages to Flagged Revision's "Require review for revisions from everyone except Reviewers" setting. That way people can suggest edits but these won't be publicly visible unless approved by a reviewer or administrator. Optionally, semi-protection can be added to prevent edits from unregistered or new accounts. What do you guys think?

Qgil-WMF (talkcontribs)

The principle sounds interesting. What pages are you thinking of? Maybe it's easier to just report pages that should benefit from Flagged Revisions and change their status unless there is a good reason not to. Should we try with a just a few first?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

There are 7 in ns0 (none worth unprotecting), one in Extension and none in Help or Manual. Waldir, what pages are you talking about?

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

I'm thinking all of them, really. It might be worth revisiting what we understand by "worth unprotecting". There is always a small detail (a typo, a minor rephrasing to make things clearer, etc.) that we will overlook — nothing's ever perfect, after all. As an example, just yesterday I noticed that the main page has a link to "How does MediaWiki work?", a redirect that can be replaced with its actual target, "Manual:What is MediaWiki?". Requiring edit requests makes the workload for such small edits triple. Besides, this wiki doesn't get much vandalism/spam (AFAIK), so it shouldn't be such a problem.

In any case, we can certainly try it with one or two pages and reassess after a month or two. Any edits will only be visible immediately if made by reviewers or admins, and should any of them screw up (which is rather unlikely to happen, as you might imagine), the right can easily be removed; at the same time, autoconfirmed users will be empowered to suggest edits (to make a git analogy, that's kind of a pull request rather than a patch, where the final repository gets the actual authorship in the version history). So what do you say about a test trive?

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

It's no big deal. If it's just those 7 pages (I'm excuding the main page and Visual editor/Feedback which might still be linked in edit view from somewhere) I can do it immediately.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Great, please do. Just one question: what do you mean by "which might still be linked *in edit view* from somewhere"? a url with action=edit?

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

Yes. Well, I've unprotected all that was possible: there's no FlaggedRevs in main and Project namespace, so not much.

Nnemo (talkcontribs)

I thing this is a very good idea.

Countless times, I have wanted to improve - most often correct - a page or a template, and I gave up, because it was locked The wiki gets no gain.

Countless times also, I have edited a page, or a part of the home page, with flagged revisions, and my edit went live after a few hours or days.  The wiki gets improved.

However, in the proposal by Waldir, there is one thing I don't like : the part "except Reviewers". If we place a barrier in front of content editing, why would reviewers have a passe-droit ? Admins behaving "above the law" are a chronic disease in Wikipedia communities. If there is a good reason to allow reviewers to edit directly, then there is a good reason to allow everyone to edit directly.

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

This is a dead horse, FlaggedRevs has been removed from MediaWiki.org.

Nnemo (talkcontribs)

If one has removed this, then one can put it back.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

But we aren't going to. Failed technologies need to be allowed to die.

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