Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Regular support for FlaggedRevs

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Ongoing research

Hi Wostr - thanks for filing this wish! I wanted to also note that my team at the Wikimedia Foundation is currently doing some research (T381044) to help determine what the plan should be for Flagged Revisions going forward. If you have anything to share about your experiences of using the software I'd love to hear them - what works well, or less well, with the software? What improvements or fixes would you be hoping for as part of this regular support? Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 14:14, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

The whole thing with FlaggedRevs in pl.wiki is complicated on many levels. Apart from our internal issues with the rules and recommendations related to FlaggedRevs, my entry on the Community Wishlist pages was basically related to one issue.
FlaggedRevs in pl.wiki has its supporters and opponents, but there is no consensus to remove this tool from pl.wiki (I rather suspect there would be a strong resistance to this), especially considering the huge amount of work and time of volunteers over the years to keep this tool working at the right level (the vast majority of edits are reviewed on an ongoing basis, over 99%).
However, over the years, with increasing frequency, voices (not only in the pl.wiki community but also from WMF employees) have been raised that, given the lack of support for FlaggedRevs from WMF and the simultaneous technical progress of MediaWiki, at some point FlaggedRevs may simply be disabled as incompatible with newer versions of the software used. Hence this thread on Community Wishlist page. Wostr (talk) 19:03, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

@Wostr Thanks, this is helpful to know and totally makes sense. I understand it's worrying not knowing what is going to happen with this software. You mentioned there would be strong resistance to removing Flagged Revisions from pl.wiki - what is it about the software that you think editors would be opposed to losing? I'm just trying to understand what the strengths of FlaggedRevs are and why communities value it. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

There will certainly be very different opinions in the pl.wiki community, including those regarding the complete removal of this tool, so this will be my own opinion and not even an attempt to generalize it to the entire community.
The introduction of FlaggedRevs has significantly reduced the visibility of vandalism in pl.wiki. Thanks to this solution, the public perception of pl.wiki has changed over the years, from the previously perceived low quality of content that could be vandalized at any time by anyone, to the current situation, in which pl.wiki is treated as a more reliable source of knowledge (of course with some problems with verifiability and maintaining a neutral point of view on certain topics). For this reason, I consider this to be quite a significant progress in how the project is perceived by readers (not editors). Especially considering the decline in the quality of other online sources of knowledge and the increasing level of disinformation on the Internet. With a relatively narrow group of active users, the pl.wiki community would not be able to react quickly enough to vandalism to limit its visibility in the absence of FlaggedRevs. For this reason, disabling FlaggedRevs could result in an increase in the amount of visible vandalisms, and thus reduce the credibility of pl.wiki in the public perception. I expect that disabling FlaggedRevs would be met with general community agreement for disabling editing by IPs or other editing restrictions.
At the same time, being active since 2009 in pl.wiki, I have not noticed a significant impact of FlaggedRevs on the number of active users. The gradual decrease in the active user base is noticeable not only in pl.wiki and not only in projects using FlaggedRevs. However, there are sometimes voices from new, active users that it was the presence of FlaggedRevs that contributed to the fact that they registered in pl.wiki (they were less afraid that their contributions would be vandalized), and then made more edits so that their contributions would not have to be reviewed by other editors. This effect is difficult to quantify, if at all possible. However, if it works in any way, it is in the direction that pl.wiki should be heading – to try to attract not random users, but those who have knowledge in specific fields, are able to evaluate the sources they use and meet the project's rules and recommendations (which is becoming more and more difficult and I see the reason mainly in social changes among younger generations). Wostr (talk) 10:37, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

@Wostr Thank you for taking the time to write this, it's very helpful. Do you actively review edits requiring review? If so, what interface(s) do you use to find those edits?

Do you ever hear confusion from new editors, who expect that their changes should be visible right away? This is one of the reasons development on the extension paused - because of a perception that it negatively impacted new users, so it's one of the aspects that I'm interested to learn more about. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 12:12, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

I can't say I do it actively, I have over 15k pages on my Watchlist and I try to review any edits on these pages on an ongoing basis. Occasionally I review using existing tools (like pl:Specjalna:Zdezaktualizowane_przejrzane_strony, [1] or [2]) or when I come across some unreviewed edits while editing articles.
As for the negative feelings of new users, I don't think there's any misunderstanding of how the FlaggedRevs system works that would cause confusion. Given the long time FlaggedRevs is present in pl.wiki and proper message boxes that inform about the unreviewed status, I think new users know (or are being told in an appropriate way) that their edits need to be reviewed. What new users sometimes find irritating is the time it takes to review their edits. While most edits are reviewed very quickly, there are edits that may remain unreviewed for weeks or even months (but these are a small fraction, which is usually caused by the fact that edit was made on a difficult topic or it was complicated in some way). We used to have a dedicated page where new users could request to review their edits faster, but this didn't work out and only gave new users the false hope that reviewing would be faster. Wostr (talk) 17:43, 10 March 2025 (UTC)