[WikiEN-l] Improve quality by reviewing all new articles

Fri Dec 16 13:43:51 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>  
>
>>>Yes, it won't necessarily lower the workload, but it would certainly
>>>improve the quality of our articles.
>>>
>>>Mgm
>>>      
>>>
>>How?  The quality of the articles is exactly equal if someone puts
>>them into a queue and you delete it or someone creates it and you
>>delete it.
>>    
>>
>
>Without making any comment on the merits of the specific proposal at
>hand (it sounds great to me, but then again I haven't thought it through
>enough yet), I can answer this question...
>
>The question is what happens in the case of an overlooked article?  What
>happens when the New Pages Patrollers get behind or there is a gap in
>coverage?
>
>The default failure mode of the patrolling process today says "Anything
>we don't look at, we assume is good enough to go on the site" ->
>Seigenthaler.  The proposed failure mode of the patrolling process says
>"Anything we don't look at, we leave it in the queue until someone gets
>around to it."  If the queue of new articles by newbies is time-stamp
>sorted, then we will often be only a few minutes behind, sometimes maybe
>an hour.
>
>Now, this need not necessarily be done with a queue or a gateway model.
> Another idea in the same general area is the long-desired 'check off'
>model for collaborative RC/new pages patrolling.
>  
>
As I already offered somewhere else, I could modify my "Tasks" extension to
* automatically flag every new article with a "checkme" task
* automatically flag edits that delete a huge amount of text with a
"check for vandalism" task
These are just examples, I could add lots more here (low "[[" to bytes
ratio = unwikified :-)

If I add this, some assurance that the extension would be used some day
would be nice, though. I'll probably end up rewriting the validation
feature, and the stable version feature seems to be obsolete due to
parallel development. Please, not again.

Magnus