User:WereSpielChequers/Invisible flagged revisions

This is a draft proposal for a major change on the English language Wikipedia. Collaborators welcome but please keep queries and opposition to the talkpage until this goes live.

Invisible flagged revisions is a proposed quality improvement process for the English Wikipedia.

WP:Flagged Revisions is software implemented on many language versions of Wikipedia, including German. Under Flagged Revisions, article edits by unapproved editors, including new users and IPs, only go live if approved by an editor with admin or reviewer rights. English Wikipedia has a similar system WP:Pending Changes but only for a small number of articles, mainly where there have already been problems with vandalism or BLP violations. In past discussions, there has been no consensus to implement flagged revisions on the English Wikipedia. One of the areas of disagreement has been whether the reviewers are responsible for checking if edits are not vandalism, or checking that statements are true; another concern has been that, as happened on German Wikipedia, when the system first goes live there can be large backlogs of unapproved edits until a sufficient number of editors are whitelisted or appointed as reviewers. But most contentious is that flagged revisions stifle the instant editing that some consider part of Wikipedia's soul.

In our current system while most edits are screened for vandalism, some, including some blatant vandalism, slip through completely unnoticed, whilst other edits are checked and rechecked many times over. The advantages of flagged revisions are that unchecked edits are easily identified so less vandalism persists and there is less waste of volunteer time. With a flagged revision system it is easy for editors to choose to only check newbie edits that no one else has yet checked.

Having separate flags for "not vandalism" and "verified" resolves the dispute as to who is checking what.

These blatant vandalisms have slipped past new page patrol:
 * 1) 7 days
 * 2) 7 days
 * 3) 8 days
 * 4) 10 days
 * 5) 9 days
 * 6) 9 days
 * 7) 17 days
 * 8) 27 days
 * 9) 7 months
 * 10) 7 months
 * 11) more than two years
 * 12) more than two years

As these examples had all stuck for at least a week it is fair to assume they had also got past the watchlisters.

Design/Workflow
Similar to Flagged revisions, edits by unapproved editors would be flagged until checked, but instead of a binary flag which people then argue whether it should mean "not vandalism" or "checked as correct", there would be four statuses: Unchecked, Not vandalism, Verified, Trusted user.

Unlike Flagged revisions all new edits would go live immediately and the whole system would be invisible to new editors. Therefore any backlogs would merely be alerting us to existing problems rather than creating new ones.

Additional "trusted users" could be automatically created by a formula such as "if an editor has edits flagged as "verified" by 3 others, their subsequent edits are as a "trusted user".

Userrights
Some existing userrights would obviously map to being able to set either or both flags. But even those who could set both flags need to be able to mark an edit as one where we have checked that it isn't blatant vandalism but we haven't verified the data to a reliable source. In terms of edge cases, I would assume that an unsourced change to a reliably cited fact would be reverted. As Rollbacker and Reviewer both exist, there is no need for new uerrights, though many members of the community would need an additional userright to make this run smoothly.

Special:RecentChanges
Special:RecentChanges would need amending so that users with the relevant userrights could see which edits had the statuses Unchecked, Not vandalism, Verified, Trusted User; and also be able to filter by such flags. Admins would also need to be able to see who had logged edits as verified or not vandalism, ideally we should also have lists of people who had had edits flagged as verified or not vandalism by more than a certain number of editors so they can be whitelisted.

IT Resources
Clearly such a change would require some development resource. However the WMF must by now have given up hope of getting any form of flagged revisions implemented on Wikipedia, so if we can get consensus for something that would reduce vandalism it is reasonable to assume that IT resource would be forthcoming.