Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions

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The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. Thus references or links to this page should not describe it as "policy".

Please note that this page is in its very early stages with many issues still under discussion, so please be very WP:BOLD in improving it. Also, if you fear this will mean the end of Wikipedia's traditional concept of immediate editing, please read this statement by Erik Möller.

This page in a nutshell: The proposal is for the introduction of a system whereby articles are validated that they are presentable and free from vandalism. The approved versions are known as Sighted versions.

This proposal is for the introduction of a system whereby users who are not logged in may be presented with a different version of an article than users who are. Articles are validated that they are presentable and free from vandalism. The approved versions are known as Sighted versions. All logged-in users will continue to see and edit the most recent version of a page. Users who are not logged in will initially see the most recent sighted version, if there is one. If no version is sighted, they see the most recent one, as happens now. Users looking at a sighted version can still choose to view the most recent version and edit it.

Discussions about validation has been going on for some time.^[1] The document Wikipedia:Pushing to validation summarizes the discussion at Wikimania 2006 about the need to validate articles. The vision is ambitious: to make Wikipedia a credible source of information, and requires that we shift our focus from quantity to quality.^[2] These proposals are modest beginnings towards that goal.

Contents 1 Sighted versions 2 Requirements for Sighted pages 3 Surveyor rights 4 Administrator rights 5 Suggested roll-out strategy on the English Wikipedia 6 Sighted versions on German Wikipedia 7 Notes and references

[edit] Sighted versions

Sighted revisions mark at least a light indication of quality (or at least freedom from vandalism), meaning at least one trusted editor (Surveyor) has confirmed that the article is presentable to the wider public. This proposal puts a more positive spin on the accepting and reverting of changes than what we are already doing.^[3] This change will make the wider public aware of how much effort we put into quality assurance. There are benefits beyond improving our public image, most importantly:

• Semi-protection could be used less often allowing for more users to edit those pages. This is significant improvement because some of our articles are constantly semi-protected.^[4]

• Much of the incentive to vandalize is removed by not immediately showing vandalism. The number of vandalism reverts has steadily increased since 2001, and constituted in early 2006 about 6% of our edits.^[5] Currently, on less-watched pages vandalism and harmful comments can remain for a long time. The average time for reverting mass deletion vandalism was, according to an IBM study in 2004, slightly over one week.^[6]

• When a regular editor edits a page (or page section) immediately after someone inserts subtle vandalism (into another section). The edit history can look rather innocent, and to be safe one has to either check every diff or compare with a previous version that one trusts. With sighted revision there is a simple "one-click" method of viewing all changes since the last trusted version. This is assuming we do not auto-sight surveyor edits.

[edit] Requirements for Sighted pages

For an article to be confirmed initially as sighted, an editor needs to read the complete article and check that the page:

• Is clear of vandalism.
• Contains no spam in the external links.
• Is clear of libel and unsourced statements about living persons.
• Is clear of obvious unencyclopaedic content.
• Contains some references to reliable sources.
• Has been around for several days.
• Has been spell-checked. (Firefox/Opera/toolbars can help with this.)
• Is readable (uncluttered) and is not tagged for cleanup. There should be no links to non-existent images.

Like other Wikipedia edits, the decision to sight a version of an article can be reverted by other editors.

Once a page is sighted, edits to the sighted revision could be automatically reviewed (to the same level) when edited by a Surveyor. Upon editing, Surveyors will be prompted to review with a diff (reference) to the last sighted version to make sure someone else has not inserted vandalism while they were editing the page. A new page created by a Surveyor should be sighted by a different editor, unless others have substantially edited the page or it is subject to repeated vandalism.

[edit] Surveyor rights

Reviewing pages requires the surveyor right. This right will be given liberally. The intention is that any user who is not a vandal should have this right. The question is how to capture this notion in a safe way. If one is too permissive, we risk having vandals abusing the feature. If the conditions are too strict, we might alienate new contributors and create an unnecessary class hierarchy among our users. The goal is then that "any user who is not a vandal" should be able to survey revisions, the following attempts to formalize this notion (also see talk):

1. Any trusted editor may be granted rights by an administrator, regardless of their edit count.
2. The right will also be given automatically by the software to editors who meet the following conditions:
   • Has an account for 30 days
   • Has 150 edits
     • 30 edits to article namespace pages
     • 10 article namespace pages edited
     • 15 days of edits
   • Has confirmed an e-mail account
3. Administrators can also revoke the flag if needed (much like blocking an account). This can happen if:
   • The user deliberately sights versions containing vandalism
   • The user repeatedly violates WP:3RR with respect to sighting versions
   • The user engages in other repeated disruption involving reviews
   • The user requests removal of the right because they prefer not to be involved

Surveyor users have the following rights:

• Review revisions to "sighted level". Some control over the values of the tags can still be exercised to an extent.
• Patrol non-reviewable pages
• Access to the list of Unreviewed Pages (lets users see unreviewed pages, reviewed pages that have unreviewed changes, and a category filter)

[edit] Administrator rights

Administrators would be able to do the following:

• Grant or revoke Surveyor rights
• Change the per-page settings of whether the current or stable version shows for readers. This is to be used in the cases given below (see the "rollout" section)

[edit] Suggested roll-out strategy on the English Wikipedia

The Foundation has set up a public test-wiki to allow people to get a feeling for the software. Each Wiki community can decide whether they wish to deploy this feature, and in that case, how to use it.

For Sighted Versions on the English Wikipedia, it seems reasonable to choose an incremental approach for rollout. That is, showing the sighted version to readers should first be applied to a small set of articles, and then extended to more articles in a controlled fashion, as needed. This is also to ensure that there are enough Surveyors willing to sight changes, so that no large backlog will queue up. Any page can be sighted, but the current version will show by default unless an admin specifically sets the stable version to show for readers. This can be used in the place of various instances of page protection.

• Sighted versions should be shown to readers for pages that are permanently semi-protected, such as God and George W. Bush. As semi-protected pages can't be edited by users without an account, it is hard to see how this could harm anybody.

• As a next step, one might mark biographies of living persons as sighted in larger numbers, and show the stable version to readers. Since vandalism and POV edits on such biographies can cause harm (inasmuch as libel might be inserted), these pages will clearly benefit from the "Sighted versions" approach.^[7]

• High-traffic pages that are in vandalized states significant portions of the time should be set similarly. Again, this would be in the place of semi-protection of pages.

[edit] Sighted versions on German Wikipedia

See de:Wikipedia:Gesichtete Versionen

Sighted versions have been in testing on the German Wikipedia since May 5 2008. Lessons learnt there can be considered when the feature is close to implementation on the English Wikipedia. The main points of the German system are:

"A "sighted" version is a version of an article which is marked as being free of vandalism. Multiple versions of an article can be thus marked. The right to mark articles in this way is very easy to obtain and articles can "sighted" with little effort."

"Each user, who has had an account on Wikipedia for a certain time and made a certain number of edits in the article namespace, automatically receives the right to mark article versions as "sighted". The marking can take place in the following ways:

• A new article created by a user with the Surveyor right will automatically be marked as "sighted".
• If a user with the Surveyor right edits an article, then the new version will be marked as "sighted" if
  • either the previous version was marked as "sighted"
  • or the user marks his edit as "sighted", similarly as now edits can be marked as "minor".
• The current version of an article can be marked as "sighted", without producing a new article version. This will be noted in Special:Log."

[edit] Notes and references