Hmm... Forwarding messages as attachments clearly doesn't work, either. Perhaps the third time will be the charm. Sorry for the mess.
William
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:03:40 -0700 From: William Pietri william@scissor.com To: announce-l@lists.wikimedia.org
As scheduled, Pending Changes went live on the English Wikipedia just after 4 pm Pacific (23:00 UTC) this afternoon!
The details of the trial are still being worked out by the English Wikipedia community, but it looks like they (or "you" as the case may be) will start off from a queue of carefully chosen pages [1] and see how to take it from there. For those who are interested in viewing the feature in the wild, Pending Changes is already enabled for, e.g, World War I [2] and Runescape [3]. Look in the top right corner for the pages-and-magnifying-glass icon.
Press coverage on this started yesterday with the BBC [4], and we've since received coverage in other sources in English (e.g., [5], [6]) and a variety of other languages. The coverage has, happily, been generally positive.
There were a few minor issues with the rollout, most of which have been resolved. There are some minor UI issues that we will work through over the next few weeks, including some lively but good-natured opinions on the amount of yellow used. We'll be keeping a close eye on things over the next few days to make sure it all continues to go smoothly.
For those who want to get a sense of how the system is performing in terms of throughput (e.g., average time-to-approval), please visit the Pending Changes Stats page [7]. You'll also be able to browse pages needing review [8] and all pages with Pending Changes activated [9].
I want to thank the whole team involved on this, with special recognition to Aaron Schulz, the developer who has done the lion's share of the development. He has done great work, both in the development and in handling with the rollout.
William
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10312095.stm [5] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.ph... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/7829476/Wikipedia-rolls-out-pending-changes.html [6] http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/62518 [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ValidationStatistics [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:OldReviewedPages [9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:StablePages