Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2021/March

Futrue of FlaggedRevs (Pending Changes) extension
Hello, I’m posting this here because this wiki has FlaggedRevs (Pending Changes) enabled.

This extension is one of the oldest extensions we have in production and currently does not have a maintainer. FlaggedRevs has been the cause of several incidents and visible regressions, especially because software decays and our technology constantly changes.

Another problem with this extension is its scope. While most of its functionalities are not enabled at Wikimedia, or are enabled on a very small set of wikis only (e.g. "multiple dimensions" was enabled only on Hebrew Wikisource, and they agreed to disable it). This has made maintaining the extension a tall order (more of a nightmare). In other words, this extension does too many things, and none well.

To move forward, barely used functionalities of this extension will be removed. Such as: support for multiple dimensions (like “style” and “tone”), multiple tiers (“quality” and “pristine”), several one of its special pages (ProblemChanges, ReviewedPages, ReviewedVersions, QualityOversight), and more. This will make it less of a burden to start maintaining and improving the main functionalities. The user interface will have only one mode in the future (currently it has four).

You can check this Phabricator ticket for more information about functionalities being removed: T277883

These removals would simplify its logic drastically, and enable us to rework its old interface, fix several deprecated dependencies that this extension is the last to block their removal of (like the "action=ajax" API), and reduce the number of issues/incidents/regressions that can be caused by this extension.

Most users of wikis that have this extension enabled (including English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia) won't see any difference. Wikis will still be able to use multiple "levels" (but not multiple "tiers") and will still be able to enable pending changes for whole namespaces, or on a group of pages only (otherwise known as “protect mode”). Those features will not be removed.

To follow the discussion around this, take a look at T185664.

Thank you for understanding and sorry for any inconvenience. Ladsgroup (talk) 17:17, 23 March 2021 (UTC)


 * pinging as recently active administrators although I appreciate some are busy in real life. I have asked about the above at Phabricator. Not sure how it will or might affect this wiki. -- Green Giant (talk) 11:40, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the best person to know would be bawolff? Gryllida (talk) 09:11, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Interactive news writing
Not nearly half as good as Pi zero's dialog tools vision, but there's an interactive IRC bot (see WN:IRC) in #wikinews-tech that breaks news writing into ten steps each of which takes three-five minutes, that can be done separately without necessarily allocating a one hour block. It responds to 'start news100'. I'm now using for all my news submissions. Feedback would be welcome. --Gryllida (talk) 09:11, 25 March 2021 (UTC)