Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-28/News and notes

A recent petition demanding the roll-out of the Flagged revisions extension on English Wikipedia has garnered 202 signatures (as of 30 December), citing concern over Wikipedia's biographies of living people. (Another petition, opposing Flagged revisions, has 14 signatures so far.)

Flagged revisions were expected to have been enabled much earlier, following several rounds of discussion and polling that culminated in broad support for the Flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal in April 2009. However, that proposal required additional software development to implement all the required features. Wikimedia Foundation staff have also been concerned that flagged revisions would turn off some contributors, so additional effort is being put towards the workflow and interface. The current or near-current state of the extension as intended for English Wikipedia is currently active on the flagged protection development wiki.

In a thread earlier this month on the Wikitech-l mailing list, William Pietri suggested that planned meetings between Flagged revisions developers and the usability team would result in a clearer idea of what remains to be done, and the implementation on English Wikipedia will probably happen "soon-ish", with a more precise estimate to be announced soon on the Wikimedia Technical Blog.

Mary Rose trust

A donation of images from the Mary Rose Trust is scheduled for 3 January 2010.^{[citation needed]} It is going to be accompanied by a DYK update of the Mary Rose and the Anthony Roll, and there has been a suggestion that it could be made into an extended Tudor England/naval theme for DYK at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Scheduling a DYK date.

Briefly

• The appointed members of the Wikimedia Boards of Trustees, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Stu West, Matt Halprin and Jimmy Wales, have all been reappointed to one-year terms, through 2010, with a unanimous vote.
• German Wikipedia has surpassed one million articles. Wikipedians created a virtual quilt to commemorate the achievement.
• The Jury for Wikimania 2011 has been chosen [1]
• New Page Patrollers now have more options: Special:NewPages now has the option to view unpatrolled new pages which are 1 hour, 1 day, 5 days, 10 days, and 15 days old. Previously, they could view new articles from the front or back end of the log.
• This bot has recently been approved to help tag any WikiProject. It does 2 tasks: First it scans a stub category that is relevant to the project (for example, for the Album project: Category:Album stubs) and makes sure that each article is added to the project and assessed as a stub; then it scans the unassessed articles (again an example for WPALBUM: Category:Unassessed Album articles) and automatically assesses the article based on the highest rating given to the article by another project (if there isn't a rating, it skips that article). If any project wants it to run on their articles, they can leave a note on User:Coffee's talk page.

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28 December 2009

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In the battle of the petitions it is now 198 to 13 in favor. Hurray flagged revisions! Besides the well known BLP issues we now have some highly popular yet controversial articles like evolution and Charles Darwin that are kept essentially permantly protected against anonymous edits because they are swamped by vandalism, OR, and good faith but unconstructive edits every time they are unprotected. With flagged revisions it may be possible to turn off protection and maybe sift through the dross and pick up some valuable edits from anon editors. Also the very fact that flagged revision is in play on certain vandalism prone articles may reduce the incentive to vandalise in the first place. Rusty Cashman (talk) 04:40, 30 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

202 / 14 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.171.2.8 (talk) 05:37, 30 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that flagged revs replace antivandal protection completely. In the high-vandalized pages the job of "sift through the dross" would be plain waste of time of expert wikipedians who will make more good by writing something good themeslves than figuring out some possible sense from some incoherent babble. IMO it is high time to get rid of this irrational fear to "deter" "possible" new contributors. The project is quite mature now. Several years ago Jimbo called for a quest for article quality. The subsequent removal various nonsense, original essays and random context such as "list of songs that mention death" did not hurt the project. Likewise, it is time to demand and expect quality, responsibility and maturity in contributors, rather than in contributions. - Altenmann >t 22:32, 3 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]