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Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Editing/Review individual edits

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Review individual edits

  • Problem: Revisions may persist for long periods of time because they're good edits and no one has a problem with them, or they may persist for long periods of time while being bad edits, simply because no one has noticed them and reverted them. Editors waste time verifying revisions that have already (silently) been verified by other people, while not noticing ones that haven't been reviewed.
  • Who would benefit: Editors, everyone
  • Proposed solution: Have an "upvote" or "reviewed" button next to revisions that indicates that you've looked through the diff and verified that it's a good change. A number on the revision history log will indicate how many people have reviewed it.
  • More comments: This would have no bearing on what revision is shown to viewers or anything like that. It would just be a helpful way to see at a glance which revisions have been checked by real human beings and are considered trustworthy/valid, and which diffs have not been viewed, and may need more attention to catch vandalism or poor quality changes. It's also psychologically similar to the "Thanks" feature, in that people can see that their edits were approved/appreciated by others and they aren't laboring in vain. It would also show editors that the revisions they're undoing were approved by multiple other people, making them think twice before wholesale revert warring. It would also help in finding the original source of subtle vandalism that has gone unnoticed for a while, so it can be reverted.
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion

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mw:Help:Patrolled_edits exists. Not sure if what you're asking for is covered at least partially by https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T25792, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T147012, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T19237, or other tasks that exist on the subject. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

FlaggedRevs can be configured to work like that. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 12:13, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Omegatron: There are already technical solutions to this (as mentioned above). Do either of those meet your requirements? Kaldari (talk) 19:28, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Those look similar, but no, not the same. This would not "set those revisions as the default revision to show upon normal page view" or require "a 'patrol' permission", and multiple people could approve the same revision, not a binary approved/unapproved state. — Omegatron (talk) 01:41, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree completely with @Omegatron: that users need a way to know whether edits have or have not been reviewed by someone. A solution for this does exist already—it’s called the RCPatrol flag. Almost 100 wikis use RCPatrol today, but it was turned off on English Wikipedia and many others. @Quiddity: researched this situation recently and assembled a very clear analysis, along with recommendations. It’s an enlightening read.

I strongly recommend that RCPatrol be turned on for English and all other wikis. Once it is on, it will be a simple matter to, for example, implement a filter for Patrolled/Unpatrolled on Recent Changes and Watchlist. The various issues that people had with RCPatrol (such as the ! symbol on Recent Changes, which displeased many) can be addressed easily, in my opinion.

The fact that a technological solution exists already for this will help tremendously with getting it done, but it does not negate the value of this proposal. There are technological, design and community issues that must be worked through in order to turn RCPatrol on. Having community behind such a proposal would make success much more likely.

Omegatron, would RCPatrol solve your problem? If it does, perhaps it might be a good idea to rephrase the Solution section somewhat, to make it more about the general goal, and to retitle the proposal along similar lines. E.g., Have a way for editors to know if an edit has been reviewed. JMatazzoni (WMF) (talk) 20:51, 22 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Both patrolling and FlaggedRevs can be used coordinate one review per revision (without necessarily changing what revision the reader sees) and both are integrated with the existing patrol/review tools. Neither really supports multiple reviews though. Patrolling can't even store them (it's just a per-revision boolean flag); FlaggedRevs allows multiple reviews (with comments, optionally) per revision but only the last one is exposed in the UI, the rest only show up on Special:Logs. Also since English Wikipedia uses FlaggedRevs for flagged protection already, if you want to allow anyone to review revisions without interfering with that, you'd have to introduce a new review level which would make the configuration and UI more convoluted.

OTOH the requirement to have multiple reviews per revision seems somewhat disconnected from the problem statement. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 00:12, 24 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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