If you want to know how Flagged Revisions feels to the casual editor, go to Wikinews and fix typos. I’m not an admin or reviewer on en:wn, and I just fixed the caption on “Geelong win 2009 Australian Football League Grand Final” — check the history.
What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live immediately left me wondering just when it would — five minutes? An hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki — it felt like I’d submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at their leisure. (That it actually went live in just a couple of minutes doesn’t change this.)
Don’t take my word for it — go typo-fixing on Wikinews and tell me how it feels to you.
I remain a big fan of flagged revisions for those times when we need it — as a less-worse alternative to protection or semiprotection — but, as per its detractors, it really does kill the wiki motivational buzz dead.
German Wikipedia has, of course, had flagged revisions on all articles for quite some time. Can anyone from de:wp tell me how it felt there?
(en:wn statistics; de:wp statistics. en:wp having times like de:wp would be an utter failure.)
Yes, I sighted those revisions.
If you are a logged in user you can set preferences to show latest revisions in preference to the flagged ones. This may not always work following links from the front page where a Dynamic Page List *should* only offer up the latest flagged version.
Wikimedia Deutschland is in the process of evaluating the effect of FlaggedRevisions : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Evaluate_the_impact_of_using_flagged_revisions
I logged out and edit an article as an IP at de:WP. After saving the edit I saw the new version and I got an information at the top of the page that all users will see the new version after sighting.
Although to be fair, our response time is pretty good. Your first edits didn’t even wait five minutes. Your first edit went live in 2 minutes, your second one went live in one minute ( Compare the history with http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Geelong%20win%202009%20Australian%20Football%20League%20Grand%20Final&diffonly=0&diff=cur&oldid=887360 to see where i’m getting my numbers from)
Oh yeah, it was quick, I’m not complaining about response time! I’m talking about how jarring it is not to have edits go live immediately.
That’s an interesting point. I still remember my first Wikipedia edit, and how thrilling it was to have it go live right that instant. A heady mix of excitement and fear. I sure found it compelling.
Of course, it’s hard to generalize. I’d love to do an A/B test on this, as well as some qualitative tests with live users.
For comparision’s sake, we’ve had one (relatively new) user who says they like flagged revs because it allows them to not worry about doing something wrong: http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Bawolff&oldid=899735#RE:_.7B.7Bimage_source.7D.7D
@bawolff – I hadn’t thought of that, it could make new users less afraid of clicking “edit”!