[WikiEN-l] Markiing a version with a status flag

Mon Aug 9 13:15:55 UTC 2004

One idea that came out of the Boston meeting was very similar to what
Maveric asked for: a way of reducing duplicate effort on RC patrol.

The idea is very simple conceptually, and ought to be fairly easy for
our noble, selfless team of hard-working developers to implement.

Every user can "flag" a particular version of an article with a status
code, such as:

* RC Cleared: I have glanced at the diff and certify that this latest
edit was NOT "simple vandalism" (i.e, graffiti like "Jerry has big ones"
or "Toby loves Christine").

* Unfair revert: Looks like someone is ignoring everyone else's
contributions and trying to make the article endorse their own POV.

If Mav or someone else I've come to trust has flagged a particular
version of an article as "RC Cleared" (or whatever we end up calling
it), then:

1. I don't have to bother re-doing his work: I can go on and check the
next edit in the Recent Changes queue.

2. I might not even want to see that version in my custom RC list. That
is, I'd like an option that says to show me all Recent Changes that
HAVEN'T GOT an "RC Cleared" flag attached to them

We might even fine-tune option #2, if it's not too hard for the
developers: let each user specify a short list of "trusted users". Then
the option would be to show all Recent Changes that DON'T HAVE an "RC
Cleared" flag from anyone in my "trusted users" set. 

(The SQL code for this is trivial, by the way.)

With a flag like "Unfair revert", we could sort articles by:

* Current version has more than 2 "Unfair revert" flags; or,

* More than a total of 5 "Unfair revert" flags have been placed on all
versions of this article in the last 3 days.

(Each user could specify parameters like "more than 3 flags" on current
version, or "more than 12 total in the last 5 hours".)

The questions are:

A. Does anyone else want this?
B. Will it slow down the server?
C. Is it valuable enough to justify trying it out?

Ed Poor
Developer Emeritus