Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/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 sighting have been going on for some time. See Reviewed_article_version (2004), Why stable versions, Stable versions, and Static version. The document Pushing to validation summarizes the discussion at Wikimania 2006 about the wish 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. These proposals are modest beginnings towards that goal.

Sighted revisions mark at least a light indication of quality (or at least freedom from vandalism), meaning at least one trusted editor (reviewer) 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. This change will make the wider public aware of how much effort we put into quality assurance.

Terminology
FlaggedRevs makes use of a set of terms that need to be understood in relationship to how they relate to the software and how they are utilized by users. The terms themselves are fully customizable to allow for language differences and may be accessed using clickable user links; but it is helpful if the basic functions are understood.

FlaggedRevs allows wikis to define "flags" that can be applied to revisions of a page to indicate that the edit didn't contain obvious vandalism. For articles in the flag group, Recent changes patrol is disabled and talkpages are not flagged.
 * Flags and flagging

Sighted versions

 * de:Wikipedia:Gesichtete Versionen (live), pl:Wikipedia:Wersje_przejrzane (live), (Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions proposed)

Sighting against vandalism

 * 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. 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. See also vandalism studies, editing frequency article space anons and the log analysis.
 * Current tools: Recent changes patrol, New pages patrol, Cluebot Soxbot III etc.

Requirement for sighting

 * PL : No obvious vandalism.
 * DE : No obvious vandalism.
 * RU : No obvious vandalism, no obvious libel towards living persons, no obvious faults in look, no obviously false statements, no obvious copyright violations, no obvious spam, no obvious content forking, no obviously obsolete data, at least one category (in articles; there are also distinct requirements for templates, categories and files).

User rights
When FlaggedRevs are enabled, several new user rights are created including: Reviewer and AutoReviewer. It is important to note the difference between the edit right and the reviewer right. A request of change in user rights is handled by administrators and can be made on the page Requests for permissions, de:Wikipedia:Gesichtete Versionen/Rechtevergabe (Sighted versions/User rights)

The edit right is the ability to edit an article. (2. meta:Foundation_issues) The reviewer right is the ability to mark the edit as non obvious vandalism and a flag is set as "sighted" and have access to the list of Unreviewed Pages.
 * Edit
 * Reviewer

The reviewer right is automatically given by the system:
 * PL: 500 edits 90 days no blocks.
 * DE: 300 edits 60 days no blocks.
 * (EN): 150 edits 30 days + email (Proposed)
 * 30 edits to article namespace pages
 * 10 article namespace pages edited
 * 15 days of edits

Alternatively, the reviewer right is given manually by administrators:
 * RU: >=100 edit >=30 days, 3 days-long discussion, no abuses or edits that contradict requirements to the sighted versions.

The autoreviewer right allows an editor to automatically mark their own edits as "sighted" (similar to a botflag).
 * Autoreviewer
 * 3000 Edits 365 days + E-Mail-Address

if: And
 * Administrators:
 * Grant or revoke reviewer and surveyor rights
 * 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
 * Change the per-page settings that determine which version of a page is displayed by default (draft or stable) for the various groups of readers. ''

Experience
DE article notice for visitors and non autoconfirmed users: DE article notice for autoconfirmed (logged in) users:
 * Note: readers may view the current draft version at any time simply by clicking on the draft link at the top of the page.''

DE:
 * Note: non-autoconfirmed editors may notice the edit notice in the edit screen.

Working principle

 * 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 reviewer edits.

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 reviewer. Upon editing, reviewers 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 reviewer should be sighted by a different editor, unless others have substantially edited the page or it is subject to repeated 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 be "sighted" with little effort."

The marking can take place in the following ways:
 * A new article created by a user with the reviewer right will automatically be marked as "sighted".
 * If a user with the reviewer 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."

The "Stable" version of a page is the last version that was both flagged, and was flagged to a high enough level to be the version immediately visible on the page to all users. So if a page is configured to display all edits immediately, then the most recent flagged revision of any sort will be the stable version. You can link directly to the stable or current versions of a page, by appending &stable=0 or &stable=1 to the url.
 * Stable

Tools

 * Special:list of Unreviewed Pages, de:Spezial:Ungesichtete_Seiten (reviewers only)
 * de:Liste der gesichteten Seiten (list of reviewed Pages)
 * de:Spezial:Markierungsübersicht (sigthing log)
 * Deep out of sight, edits to sight by category (for portal experts).
 * Random out of sight random articles ready to sight

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 reviewers willing to sight changes, so that no large backlog will queue up.
 * 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 "Quality versions" approach.

Quality versions
For an article to be confirmed initially as sighted as a Quality version, an uber-reviewer or surveyor needs to read the complete article and check that the page:


 * 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.

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 obvious vandalism.
 * The last sighted version is presented to visitors.

Links

 * DE Poll on whether the sighted versions should be continued (ended on 1 September. 362 said no, 708 said yes, 129 abstained)

Statistics
Available German statistics are at:
 * http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm (updated Nov 2008)
 * User:Hut 8.5/German editing stats (2009)
 * User:Hut 8.5/DEWP reviewer stats (5 may 2008 – 12 dec 2008)
 * http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php (2009)
 * http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/rchiststat.pl?dur=86400&lim=30&wp=DE&hl=&fl= (live)
 * de:Spezial:Markierungsstatistik (live)
 * de:Spezial:Statistik (live)

Sighted versions on the Polish Wikipedia

 * See pl:Wikipedia:Wersje przejrzane

Sighted versions have been live on the Polish Wikipedia since November 17 2008. Lessons learnt there can be considered when the feature is close to implementation on the English Wikipedia. The main points of the Polish system are:

A "sighted" version is a version of an article which is marked as being free of obvious vandalism.

Polish wikipedians have chosen the "snowball effect" scenario over the "big bang" scenario. It was decided that the implementation of sighted articles should be done slowly and carefully rather than quickly.

Statistics
Available Polish statistics are at: The last sighted version is presented to visitors.
 * http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPL.htm
 * http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php (2009)
 * pl:Specjalna:Statystyki_oznaczania (live)
 * pl:Specjalna:Statystyka (live)

Flagged versions on Russian Wikipedia

 * See ru:Википедия:Патрулирование

In August, 4, 2008 quality and sighted was turned on in ru.wp, when sighted versions were approved by ru.wp society on September 6 2008 as mechanism of patrolling new and old versions of articles.


 * readers by default see non-patrolled version. (All edits go directly live)

A "patrolled" version of an article, category or template in ru.wp should be
 * free of obvious
 * vandalism
 * slander, libel
 * spam
 * nonsense
 * have Article issues about following problems or
 * have minimal formatting,
 * have one category
 * no obsolete info or forking

Statistics

 * 14.08.2012
 * 1355 users with flag "patroller": they can mark version as sighted
 * 1270 users with flag "autopatrol": their edits don't change sighted version state to unsighted
 * (91,49% of articles flagged, 100% of categories, 99,70% of templates, 55,39% of files.
 * ru:Special:ReviewedPages
 * ru:Special:ValidationStatistics

Flagged versions on Belarussian Wikipedia

 * See be:Вікіпедыя:Догляд

In February, 5, 2011 quality and sighted was turned on in be.wp.


 * readers by default see non-patrolled version. (All edits go directly live)

A "patrolled" version of an article, category or template in ru.wp should be
 * free of obvious
 * vandalism
 * slander, libel
 * spam
 * nonsense
 * have Article issues about following problems or
 * have minimal formatting,
 * have one category
 * no obsolete info or forking

Statistics

 * be:Special:ReviewedPages
 * be:Special:ValidationStatistics

Flagged protection
Flagged protection is a proposed implementation of flagged revisions which would provide an alternative to the current semi-protection feature to allow anonymous editors and new users to edit protected articles in a limited fashion. This proposal is meant to give administrators another option besides the present full protection and semiprotection.

Any page can be flag protected, 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.


 * 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.