Re: new plan to replace flags with Readiness Markers

The readiness marker system is now live on the main wiki.  CSS styling
still to come.

Renoir has been catching the update cascade but the cached version of
articles should be soon updated to use the new templates.  However, you
might not notice a change; the default when no readiness value has been
explicitly set for a given page is not to print anything.  That said,
whenever you edit an article, please set the readiness value for it.

We still want to schedule a massive content review, where regular
contributors will go through every reference page on the site and assign a
readiness state to each.  At that point, the big purple alpha-status
warning can be removed, because each article we have a clear indication of
its content quality.

For those interested in the wiki structure, the changes are to:

* http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Property:State
The State property defines the readiness state property, and contains
definitions of each value (slightly shorter versions of the ones from Jen's
email) and links to search pages for each value.  For now, this is the page
you get to when you click on the readiness-related link in the form or main
article page.

I would still like to create a more detailed page within the WPD namespace,
something that could be incorporated within the contributor's guide.  It
would discuss readiness as a concept and give more detail to the
definitions, probably reusing some of the existing discussion of alpha/beta
stages.  But for now we have basic definitions on the property page.

* http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Property:State_Details
The State Details property will contain any editorial notes related to the
page and the reason it was given a certain state.  Nothing prints on the
final "View" mode of the article, but by saving the information as a
property they can be accessed by search functions (the above link will have
a list of all articles with a value set).

Although the property is new, it reuses the "Editorial Notes" form field
from the old flags template, which means that any custom editorial notes
should be preserved (although it's a little messy, because most of them
used their own templates which inject html code).

* http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Template:Flags_Form_Section
The old flags form section template has been reused, so that all pages that
previously allowed you to set flags now allow you to set a readiness state.
 The revised template has three elements: readiness state, state
details/editorial notes, and checked out.  Edit any reference page to see
what it looks like in action.

*  http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Template:Flags
Likewise, the old Flags template has been used to print the readiness
markers.  Any pages which previously had the option to show flags under the
title will instead show the readiness statement (if a value has been set).

The state value is printed to the page in the following format:
<div class="note readiness-state Almost_Done">
<p>This article is <a href="/wiki/Property:State"
title="Property:State">Almost Done.</a>
</p>
</div>

The "note" class is responsible for the current yellow-box display.  The
"readiness-state" and state-specific class will be used for the final CSS.
 The state-specific classes are created from the property values by
replacing spaces with "_", so they are: "Ready_to_Use", "Almost_Done",
"In_Progress", "Coming_Later", "Out_of_Date".  (The "Unreviewed" value
currently never results in a div being added to the page.)

* Property:Content_quality_flag is still used for the automatically-set
flags Needs Summary, Examples Needed, and Compatibility Incomplete.  I'll
re-write the property page (and the one for high-level issues) when I get
to writing up that article on readiness in general.

Best,
Amelia