We are currently planning to roll out a new version of the FlaggedRevs extension to all wikis on Tuesday, November 23 starting roughly 3:15pm PST (23:15 UTC). This is used for Pending Changes on en.wikipedia.org and Flagged Revisions on many other wikis (such as de.wikipedia.org and pl.wikipedia.org). The update sports a new reject button, some diff page load optimizations to help complicated diff pages load faster by displaying the diff prior to displaying the old revision, and many under-the-hood code improvements.

We have several test environments in place with FlaggedRevs/Pending Changes configured:

• 1.16wmf4 core + trunk FlaggedRevs extension (this is the closest to what we plan for our production environment):
  • en.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevs/
  • de.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevsde/
• trunk core + trunk FlaggedRevs extension (this contains several changes that won’t be deployed for a while, in addition to the updated FlaggedRevs extension):
  • de.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/de.wikipedia.org/
  • pl.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/pl.wikipedia.org/

Please let us know if you have any problems.

Update 2010-11-23: this work is now complete.

Over the next few days, English language Wikipedia users may notice a small change on some articles: a little magnifying glass where a lock once was. The icon, on the upper right corner of the article, represents an important step that Wikipedia volunteers have taken to open up articles that were previously protected from editing. Starting Tuesday at 11pm UTC, the English Wikipedia community will begin a two-month trial of a new tool called “Pending Changes” (formerly known as Flagged Protection).

Articles that are frequently subjected to malicious edits have long been locked, sometimes for years, and protected from editing by new and anonymous users. Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteers from the community have been working to develop Pending Changes, a softer alternative to these editing restrictions. At present, only about 0.1 percent of the 3.3 million articles on the English Wikipedia are under edit protection. This tool should help reduce disruptive edits or errors to articles while maintaining open, collaborative editing from anyone who wants to contribute.

When Pending Changes is applied to an article, the article will be open for editing by anyone, including anonymous and new users. When edits are made by new or anonymous users, changes will be reviewed before they appear on the main version of the article. Anyone can view these proposed edits by clicking on the “Pending Changes” tab alongside the “Edit” and the “History” tabs. In addition, by scrolling over the magnifying glass icon, you can quickly see exactly how many changes are pending review.

During this trial, the community will select which articles will use Pending Changes, with an initial 2,000 page maximum. If you’re interested in learning more about how Pending Changes works, or to test it out yourself, you can read our Q&A and the community-written help pages or check it out in Wikimedia Labs.

Moka Pantages
Communications

One of the wonderful characteristics of Wikimedia’s wikis, including Wikipedia, is that every change ever made to a page is recorded, back to the very first version (compare, for example, the first version of the article about chess with the most recent version of the same article). This characteristic also makes it possible to assign quality assessments to specific versions, thereby giving our readers greater transparency about the perceived current or past quality of an article.

A very powerful software feature called Flagged Revisions makes it possible to systematize such quality assessments.  It’s been in production use in many of our wikis for more than a year now, including the second-largest Wikipedia, the German language edition. Fundamentally it’s a very flexible feature, and different project communities (the German Wikipedia, the English Wikibooks, etc.) can come up with configurations that suit their needs. By means of our public issue tracker, they can then request from the Wikimedia Foundation that such configurations be turned on.

Even though we’ve made no official announcements about this, you may have seen media reports that Flagged Revisions will soon be enabled in the English Wikipedia. Indeed, there is a specific proposal that was developed by the English Wikipedia community, entitled Flagged protection and patrolled revisions. It’s a very thoughtful proposal that attempts to balance the desire for higher quality, and more systematic assessment thereof, with the immediacy of Wikipedia as it exists today, and was supported by a large majority of interested Wikipedia editors. The idea behind this proposal is to allow regular contributors to systematize a first, basic assessment of all edits by new contributors. However, this assessment will be purely for informational purposes to the reader: a reader will see whether or not the version of an article they look at has been patrolled, and if not, whether a prior patrolled version is available.

Only in a small percentage of cases, we would require changes to be patrolled before becoming the default view for readers. The proposal is to do so initially in the case of articles at high risk of vandalism, including high risk biographies of living people, where false information can do the most serious harm to an individual.

A popular media narrative of this proposal (in the cases where it has been reported roughly correctly to begin with) is that it represents a “clamping down” on Wikipedia’s open editing process. That is nonsense. It is presently the case that many high-risk articles are completely uneditable by new contributors, which is referred to as page protection. For example, as a completely new user, you are not able to alter the article about Barack Obama. These kinds of protections of high-risk articles have been common for many years now. If the proposed model works as intended, it will actually allow us to open up many articles for editing which are currently protected from being edited. Edits will have to be patrolled, which is clearly a step up from edits not being possible at all.

It is true that some implementations of Flagged Revisions are more conservative than that. Any edit in the German Wikipedia by a new or unregistered user has to be patrolled before becoming visible to readers. This is definitely not the case in the proposed English Wikipedia configuration. We believe in letting our communities experiment with different approaches in an attempt to find the right balance.

A test wiki for the English Wikipedia configuration has just been set up in the Wikimedia Labs, and we’ll be importing articles from Wikipedia soon and make a broad call for testing. It’s important for us to get this right – we want to make sure that we don’t make Wikipedia harder to use, for our readers or our editors, in the process of deploying this functionality. That said, we hope to be able to deploy Flagged Revisions in production use on the English Wikipedia within 2-3 months.

From Wikimania in lovely Buenos Aires,
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

[UPDATE 8/26] This post originally said that all biographies of living people would be “flagged protected”. This is not correct. The current proposal is for for 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. I apologize for the confusion; thanks to Sage Ross for the quick correction.