Strategic Planning

Proposal:Filtering out vandalism in edit history

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


SUMMARY

Allow editors to mark revisions as "hidden" and add hide those revisions in article history page by default. This functionality could be used to hide vandalism from the edit history.

PROPOSALS

Users with the appropriate permission can set and remove 'hidden flag' on revisions. The delegation of this authority can be decided by individual wikis and may be assigned to pre-existing groups or a new group may be created. Hidden (un)flagging are logged like other activities, and accessible on a per-user or per article basis.

By default, 'hidden' revisions are not shown on the history page. Instead, a button similar to 'there are 22 hidden revisions (show)' is displayed. Access to hidden revisions would always be provided even to anonymous users. Registered users could set a user preference to un-hide by default.

MOTIVATION

Currently the edit history of popular articles is almost unusable. There's no reliable way to distinguish between major edits, typo fixes, vandalism and spam and the sheer number of vandalism makes it tudious to browse throughout the history for useful edits.

The proposed mechanism would allow people to participate in quality improvement in small bits, without the need to deal with complexities of the whole system and would encourage them in further and deeper participation.

KEY QUESTIONS

1. Will the feature be used or ignored?

2. Is the value of this feature worth its development cost?

3. Is the value of this feature worth the social costs (policing hiding activities; deciding who has access to hide)?

4. Are the positive effects of this feature worth the inappropriate use which may occur?

POTENTIAL COSTS

1. Software development .

2. Editor's resources diverted to twiddling flagging bits.

3. Rollbacks can be automatically hidden.

REFERENCES

1. Link to other relevant proposals, documents, etc.


2. End of template. Area under this for use by readers.

COMMUNITY DISCUSSION

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Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Filtering out vandalism in edit history.

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