User:Mr.Z-man/on FlaggedRevs
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
There seems to be some misconceptions flying around about Flagged Revisions, so rather than repeating myself all over the place, I'll summarize the main ones here:
Misconceptions
[edit]FlaggedRevs will fix the BLP problem
[edit]FlaggedRevs will barely make a dent in the BLP problem. At best, a large scale implementation of FlaggedRevs will prevent blatant vandalism from being visible to the public on BLPs. This is not the BLP problem. The BLP problem is the insertion of poorly sourced contentious and POV material and insertion of incorrect material that, on first glance, looks like it could be true. People are mad when our articles call them a "douchebag", people are harmed when our articles call them a child molester. At worst, it will lull people into a false sense of security and the amount of people monitoring BLPs will decrease.
Any large scale usage of FlaggedRevs (we have about 1106600 BLPs, anything that covers all of them will be large scale) will require reviewer rights to be granted extremely liberally, if not automatically, for the system to not quickly become so hopelessly backlogged that it needs to be disabled. The same people who will flag most revisions are the same RC patrollers who don't rollback insertions of libel currently. If FlaggedRevs is to have a significant impact on the BLP problem, the ability to mark revisions as flagged must be tightly controlled.
FlaggedRevs will require every revision to be reviewed
[edit]Yes and no. It will (sort of), but if and only if we use a trial that allows the use of FlaggedRevs on every article. Even then, FlaggedRevs still has to be manually activated on each article, which will take a long time; it would be a gradual increase in workload. Additionally, multiple edits can be reviewed together; if an article has lots of edits in a row, and the net result of all of them is a revision that meets the flagging criteria, only the top revision needs to be flagged.
FlaggedRevs means the end of open editing
[edit]Not at all. Almost all FlaggedRevs proposals involve using FlaggedRevs in some cases where we would normally use semiprotection, and in some cases, full protection. Anyone can still edit, the only difference is that on any article that has a flagged revision, they'll be editing the draft version. If their edits are good, they will likely go live in a matter of minutes.