User:Krinkle/FlaggedRevs and Edit patrolling

Hello,

I was reading "Submissions/Flagged Revisions vs. Page Protection" and wanted to share a third way of methodology that you may want to consider discussing.

So far it includes two methods:
 * Page protection (level=sysop and level=autoconfirmed)
 * Flagged-Revisions (articles protected with FP show the latest stable version to readers)

And in it's comparison it basically addresses three problems/goals:
 * Overal quality assurance
 * Prevention of vandalism on popular articles
 * Checking all edits

I think these 3 problems/goals should not be handled by the same solution. FlaggedRevisions is in my opinion a problem because it tries to fix three problems at once: protection against vandalism, reviewing of all edits to catch vandalism (this fails if FlaggedRevisions is not applied to all pages, because vandalism on other pages is not found that way), quality assurance.

I want to mention a third method that many wikis have enabled:
 * Edit patrolling (wg UseRCPatrol = true;)

Currently 32 wikis have edit-patrolling enabled (including commonswiki, nlwiki*, frwiki*, fiwiki*, hewiki* and itwiki*). Edit-patrolling means that all edits are checked of all articles. Using Special:RecentChanges?hidepatrolled=1&hideliu=1 (only works for users that have the 'patrol' right), or via gadgets such as RTRC.

The main difference between patrolling revisions and flagging revisions, is that
 * 1) With FlaggedRevisions reviewers review the entire contents of a page from a certain revisions, whereas edit patrolling marks the edit itself (the difference). So the latest version could be patrolled, and earlier edits not (yet) patroller. This spreads the work load, and makes reviewing easier if a lot of changes have been made, that way reviewers can mark parts as reviewed, this is not possible with FlaggedReviewers
 * 2) FlaggedRevisions changes the view for readers, only the reviewed revision is visible by default. Patrolling does not do this, patrolling is only visible to patrollers.
 * 3) FlaggedRevisions doesn't use MediaWiki core rc_patrolled/rev_patrolled. Instead it keeps a separate copy in its own mapping table.

I think the best solution in the end is a combination. Something I hope to see in a later version of FlaggedRevs:
 * Reviewing edits, not revisions as the whole page
 * Enable reviewing always on all pages, not only a few pages
 * But not on all pages the requirement for review before changes are visible, that is only needed on pages that need protection
 * Instead of indicating the latest sighted version manually, it is detected automatically. The latest revision that has no unpatrolled revisions after it, is the sighted version.
 * Use MediaWiki core rc_patrolled/rev_patrolled instead of keeping a separate mapping table

-- Krinkle

References:
 * includes sister projects in the same language