Wikipedia talk:Targeted flagging

Appeal - can we avoid a poll or support and oppose. Let's look at the upsides and downsides, see if that can be improved, and avoid polarisation. A poll may be needed at some point, but perhaps not immediately.--Scott Mac (Doc) 16:42, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

• Seems a well-thought-out proposal, that addresses the problem articles without taking the non-problem articles with them, and keeps things a lot simpler than the FPPR scheme would. If it's not hard to do technically, I'd be inclined to do this and see how it turns out.--Kotniski (talk) 18:07, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
• Agree with Kotniski; this manages at once to be more useful and less intrusive than FPPR. Steve Smith (talk) 18:11, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
• As someone who has been on the opposite side from this proposal's author in several AfD discussions I would like to say that this looks like a good way forward. The main advantage is its simplicity when compared to the Flagged Protection and Patrolled Revisions proposal (which I still haven't been able to properly get my head around) both in terms of software requirements and implementation. The only concern that I have is that selecting an article for this treatment based on the number of editors watchlisting it is open to gaming. If we select only those articles that appear on no watchlists then the creator of a hatchet-job article only needs to watchlist it and it will not fall under this proposal's scope, and increasing the number of watchlisting editors needed would encourage the creation of sockpuppets to get over whatever hurdle we have. To be effective we would still need to have some definition of "trusted editors" whose watchlisting would count towards the number needed. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:20, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure we can come up with some formula to reduce gaming. Although every system can be gamed. Perhaps "not on the watchlist of any admin" - or "watchlist of x users with over 25 edits".--Scott Mac (Doc) 19:25, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Barring locking the wiki down completely, any proposal will be possible to work around for a sufficiently motivated person. This raises the bar significantly, but is still quite elegant and simple. I like it. henrik•talk 19:40, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

• Maybe I haven't followed all this closely enough, but what are "FPPR" and "FRPR"? You need to expand or link some of these acronyms. Other than that, yes, I think this seems like a good idea. I would remove the idea of "shades of notability" entirely and just talk about watchlists though. Gigs (talk) 19:18, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Sorry, both should be FPPR which stands for Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions.--Scott Mac (Doc) 19:28, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
• Seems like a good idea to me. I would want the first pass to be a "90-day trial" or something just so we have a chance to formally evaluate how it came out. I'd also like to see a formal note about who reviews these (same as FPPR?) and perhaps have a cabal overseeing the implementation for those 90 days. There are a number of other details (article clearly marked etc.) that I'm sure will be addressed, but probably should be spelled out here rather than referring elsewhere. Hobit (talk) 19:54, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
• Good idea. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 20:02, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
• I would support this (but then I'm a supporter of flagged revisions anyway), but I am concerned that this would lose the benefit of Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions as this proposal would not open up semi-protected articles for editing by all editors as flagged protection would. Davewild (talk) 09:28, 24 December 2009 (UTC)
• Better than flagged revisions, but the problem of this proposal, is the assumption that lesser known articles in its current state, or in the state of its creation, will be in an accurate state, which is a fairly large assumption. I support FPPR over this proposal. Remember, WP:NODEADLINE. I'm equally concerned that FPPR will create a small cabal with the power of marking the flags...unless they do something like recent page flagging where they give it to auto-confirmed users. Another problem is that for lesser known, but still notable, articles, if a piece of information changes on those articles, and there is no, or few, active editors to watch over those revisions, then the "IP" version will be inaccurate if an IP updated it. Lastly, there remains the problem of human error/abuse/circumvention/vandalization of the system. One proposal I do have is that patrolled revisions be enabled now, and instead of creating a new list, just use the Special:RecentChanges->Living People list that we already have (and just add flags) to avoid creating yet another watchlist to be watched. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 04:49, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
• I'm skeptical of this, as one of the people who really thinks original-straight-up FlaggedRevs is not a good idea, but I'd be willing to try it on one condition: as soon as FPPR is implemented, it should override this proposal, and ideally a bot would go through and reverse much of the flagged-ness added under it. I think it's a worthwhile temporary measure—one that will help ease us into FPPR—but I don't want it used as a way to sneak in flagged protection that would not be allowed under pure FPPR. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 05:19, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
• Much better idea than FPPR. FPPR doesn't really solve any problems as far as BLP is concerned--it just lets us open things up a little in the case of pages that would already be semi'd. This really has the potential to make things better. ⇌ Jake Wartenberg 06:42, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
• I was talking to SMD about this on IRC a week ago, and, without the numbers, I noted it generally made sense. I'm generally supportive of any flagged revisions plan that: a) solves the BLP problem, and b) keeps editing open. We need to make sure both, and not just one, is protected. This does. As Z-Man has calculated, these articles get approximately ten edits per year each. FR both protects these BLPs and keeps Wikipedia open. Any fine-tuning can be done later, but this is generally a good idea. Sceptre ^(talk) 15:33, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
• I'm willing to try anything that might reduce the BLP problem. Let's try this and see what effect it has. ++Lar: t/c 16:29, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

• As someone who is deeply ambivalent about flagged revisions, I am impressed by this proposal. Where flagged revisions is vulnerable to abuse by owners, administrators and other cabalists, and seems little more than yet another power shift towards established editors, the poorly-watched criterion of this proposal neatly sidesteps such concerns. Depending on the selectivity of targeted flagging, the backlogs argument is a significant point in its favour. How can we move forward with this?  Skomorokh  15:00, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

• I would support this proposal. I do have a question though. What about those cases in which a high profile BLP receives libel? For example, I seem to remember that Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were both marked as dead after Obama's inauguration. It was reverted quickly, but the damage was done, and this proposal would not cover it.--Danaman5 (talk) 05:17, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

• I agree with Skomorokh's take on this. This seems to be a well thought out plan, which I personally support over even FPPR (and possibly over maintaining the status quo. Enough to at least support the first stage trial).
  — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 08:04, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

• This is a super good idea, I can get behind this... RP459 (talk) 02:49, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
• Support. I very much dislike the concept of FPPR, and think that its goals cannot be achieved without doing great collateral damage to the project. This proposal focussed on getting more eyeballs on underwatched biographies appears coherent, and warrants support. Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 06:46, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

• I think this a wonderful idea. Being a hater of needless bureucracy, this will sound out of character coming from me. But flag protected articles must be kept seperate from targetted flagging if both are introduced.

With flagged protection, most of the edits are going to be either vandalism or minor edits correctly marked as minor. Most decisions would be straightforward, and no real harm is done if the reviewer is a little quick; in all probability they are being hasty because they're getting tired of approving spelling mistakes, or reluctantly declining good faith contributions about the subject's unsourced homosexual relationship with a horse. By contrast, with targetted flagging a far higher proportion of the edits will be major ones. Approving such edits requires a reasonable amount of attention to each contribution, to be absolutely sure that what is being added is true. Considerable harm would be done if the reviewer is hasty, as the likelihood is that their haste will result in them unwittingly approving something damaging. WFCforLife (talk) 07:31, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

• Very brief - I think this is better than the other proposals (and petitions). Brilliantine (talk) 01:14, 1 January 2010 (UTC)
• Now this I like. Simple, not much, if any backlog, and yet it gets the job done almost as good as FPPR by protecting the most vulnerable articles. The Thing _{Happy New Year!} 10:15, 1 January 2010 (UTC)
• I like this idea a lot, --Coffee // have a cup // ark // 22:37, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
• Excellent compromise. I'm all for it. -- œ^™ 10:50, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
• Looks good to me - although if, as seems more than likely, there are calls to extend its use to larger numbers of articles this may result in ongoing drama. I don't have a solution to this save to ensure there is wide publicity for any proposed change and a clear end date to any discussion. Ben MacDui 11:19, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

• I've given this a lot of thought since Scott MacDonald explained this in greater detail to me and since the practical implications of a more radical implementation would make any progress in this area impossible I think this is a good idea. At least it allows us to get the ball rolling and with a bit of luck we'll get enough qualified reviewers out of this to prove that this can work. Vyvyan Basterd (talk) 16:43, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

• Anything that enables us to just get on with a trial rather than just discussing it has my support. For heaven's sake, we've been talking about this for over a year. (I personally would prefer focusing this on BLPs thought to be targets for vandalism, but let's just get on with it.) Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 19:25, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

• I like this. I'm most concerned about the certainty of a backlog, which will nullify the advantages of the review process, making flagged articles virtually impossible to edit. David spector 2 (talk) 03:26, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
• You and me both, spector. PC is worthless if there's too many articles and not enough people willing to review. And as time goes on, any FR/PC scheme is wholly dependent upon the number of people who give enough of a rat's ass and have enough brains not to pull a Scott Mac manning the helm. If you ain't got those, PC/FR is dead in the water. And idiots pulling Scott Macs don't help. —Jeremy v^_^v ^{Components:V S M} 05:08, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Statistics about unwatched biographies

The total stats are available here: tools:~mzmcbride/milton-watchers.txt. This data is from approximately October 28, 2009.

As can be seen, about 56,000 biographies are completely unwatched. Biographies with three or fewer watchers total over 294,000. That's a little over two-thirds of all biographies of living people on the English Wikipedia. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:10, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

So, if we started with all unwatched BLPs that would be 56,000 articles. Then, if we can make that work, we can move up a bit to 1 or 2. What would be really interesting to know is: how many edits per day are there to those 56,000 articles?--Scott Mac (Doc) 20:15, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Assuming I did the query right, there have been 42,884 edits to unwatched BLPs in the last 30 days, so about 1430 edits per day. (There's also about 58,000 unwatched BLPs now) Mr.Z-man 06:35, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

That's not actually as bad as I expected, though still quite formidable. The only way to know if we can deal with it is to try. It's all a matter of how much time people are willing to put in. ⇌ Jake Wartenberg 06:45, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

One thing to keep in mind is that we shouldn't automatically assume that all (or even most, really) of the above 1430 edits are "bad". I'd wager that 90% of them are perfectly acceptable (even if any of us may not personally agree that their helpful, most are assuredly not BLP infractions), which would mean that there would probably be ~150 really questionable edits to review per month. Even if you're more pessimistic about the nature of edits to these pages, there's probably much less then 1000 edits per month.

Incidentally, has anyone considered adding an edit filter for this? I haven't really looked at edit filters so I don't know how technically feasable one would be, but getting some firmer data on this seems like it would be a good idea.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 08:11, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

1430 per day is isn't really a problem, particularly if you whitelist bot and possibly admin edits. (Anyone want to calculate what proportion those are? Bots may be high.) Naturally, most of the edits will be good, but you'll only know that if you flag and review them all. An edit filter misses the point here, as those things only sift out obvious stuff, when what we want to screen out are less obvious things (such as a poorly referenced allegation of bankruptcy) which only a human checking sources will uncover.--86.11.136.129 (talk) 12:55, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

About 48% of the edits are by bots, 18% are non-bot edits marked as minor, and 11% are by unregistered users. Mr.Z-man 15:55, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

That's interesting. I personally don't give any weight to the "minor edit" flag, since it's totally subjective, different people apply totally different standards to it's use, and it's unchangeable. ~50% being bot edits (which are generally trustworthy, for our purposes here, I'd think) is comforting.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:22, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

It's also important to note that you're looking at completely unwatched biographies only right now. If you include, for example, pages with fewer than 4 watchers, the numbers would all jump dramatically. Plenty of pages are watched by inactive or automated accounts, making them de facto unwatched. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:12, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Something that I think that would be worth thinking about (either in tandem with, or after implementing this) would be coming up with a system so that people who are actually inactive (say, 30 days without even browsing) un-watch pages. It doesn't really matter right now (although, I think that it would still be a good thing to do), but that could make a huge difference with something like this.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 19:06, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

So long as their list is still saved somehow. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 20:58, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

I'd go slightly further. I agree with the principle, but object to tampering with people's watchlists unless it is automatically restored when they log in. A big criticism of flagging is the potential for less noticeable vandalism to be actively approved. De-watchlisting will increase the likelihood of this happening. Under those circumstances the article should probably remain flagged unless unprotection is specifically requested, but watchlisting is a useful counterbalance to that risk. WFCforLife (talk) 07:07, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

I figured that the fact that users actual watchlist data wouldn't be touched would have been self-evident. That's my mistake for making assumptions, which I'll correct here: inactive users should have their watchlists ignored by the software, for as long as their inactive (with "inactive" being determined by the community; 30 days without logging in seems like a logical place to start though). Really, I think that this should be done anyway, and I should probably offer it as a Proposal on WP:VPPR at some point soon. Inactive users watchlisting any page is really worse then no one watching a page, since it can lead to a false sense of security and is just outright misleading.
— V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 07:27, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I wholly agree with that, and would support that potential proposal too. WFCforLife (talk) 07:34, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Whilst you are rightly focussing on BLPs here, I have a concern that there is a long term issue with the encyclopedia's size and the ability of any given generation of editors to maintain it. Can the above tools generate similar stats for edits to all unwatched articles? Ben MacDui 11:23, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I gather from the stats that this "simpler" proposal, instead of applying to a few hundred articles at first, will apply to 40,000 in the initial run--and with the requirement of full debates about when someone wants to manually add or remove any one of them from the list. Perhaps what we should test is a single level proposal --not the three level proposal of Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions -- on a few hundred articles. DGG ( talk ) 16:33, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand the rationale behind testing a few hundred articles. A small minority are opposed to flagging of any kind, but the major criticism of flagging is the potential for delay, effectively eliminating the "that anyone can edit" part of wikipedia. Surely it follows that the purpose of any test would be to prove we are capable of minimising any potential delay. And to prove that, we would need a large test. WFCforLife (talk) 08:55, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

It will apply to thousands of articles, but those articles get very few edits (about 0.01 non-bot edits per article per day), especially compared to the ones that would be targeted through a flagged protection system (which get a significant amount of vandalism and edit warring). The number and frequency of edits is a much more useful metric than number of articles. Mr.Z-man 15:45, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Provided the scope is kept just to unwatched or barely-watched BLPs so I can actively ignore all such articles I'm not going to give a flying fuck. If it expands too far, you Reviewers will be ill-staffed to handle it. —Jeremy v^_^v ^{Components:V S M} 05:03, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Removed effectively impossible condition

There's a short list of reasons why under-watched BLPs should be subject to this proposal. One of them was:

• These article [sic] may be the only biography on the internet [sic], and thus have more "impact" on the subject's reputation

I have removed this as bordering on patent nonsense. Any BLP for which the only biographical material available online is a half-baked WP article is an obvious candidate for AfD on obvious grounds of non-notability, and may well be speedily deletable if it doesn't bother to assert notability. This "not online except here" effect would not necessarily be the case for, say, bios that are redlinked from Darius I of Persia, because those people are long, long dead, and no one may have written a scholarly work mentioning them that is easily findable online yet (though this is decreasingly true every single day). But It's pretty close to impossible to be alive and notable today, without being on the 'Net, especially as more and more newspapers, magazines, refereed journals and even books are also available in online editions (some now only available that way). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 14:32, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

I'll take the grammatical correction, the rest is a mistaken. Lots of BLPs are the sole piece of biographical material available, and are not speedy deletable. All they have to be are articles on people which are sourced from a pastiche of newspaper reports, interviews, and other remarks, but where no substantial biography exists online. If I'm looking for a biography of George Bush, I have a choice between that of wikipedia and others. This is not the case for many other people, where Wikipedia is the only composite biography on offer.--Scott Mac (Doc) 16:23, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

FWIW, I agree with Scott. There are notable people about whom nothing much has been published yet, especially people who have become notable recently. While it is true that WP is not a news source, it is also true that it can be valuable to include current events (which include people), based on whatever is known at the time. Such articles get improved later, when more is known and WP:RS become available. David spector 2 (talk) 03:31, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes. And don't forget that there are living people whose notability is substantially or entirely in the pre-internet period; if offline resources are used for these, WP can be very prominent in search results. Rd232 ^talk 15:40, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

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