Pending Changes: first press

Have there been any other media outlets, blogs, etc. who see Pending Changes as a "loosening of controls"? I haven't; perhaps I've been hanging around with the community too much who say it will be more restrictive than before :) -MuZemike On 6/14/2010 6:39 PM, Risker wrote:

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On 14 June 2010 19:22, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.p… Spotted by Nihiltres.

<groan> The George Bush page is not going to be part of this trial, because there is no reasonable chance that the tiny, tiny percentage of useful edits will make up for all the vandalism and BLP violations that will be added. That was possibly the one thing that everyone working on the encyclopedia end of the trial came to agreement on very quickly. Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Ian Woollard

1:46 a.m.

On 15/06/2010, MuZemike <muzemike(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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To be perfectly honest, I don't think anyone knows, it will probably depend on what policies are built around it.

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-MuZemike

-- -Ian Woollard

William Pietri

2:19 a.m.

On 06/14/2010 06:46 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:

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On 15/06/2010, MuZemike<muzemike(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Have there been any other media outlets, blogs, etc. who see Pending > Changes as a "loosening of controls"? I haven't; perhaps I've been > hanging around with the community too much who say it will be more > restrictive than before:)

To be perfectly honest, I don't think anyone knows, it will probably depend on what policies are built around it.

I agree completely that the outcome is really up to the community. But personally, it's my hope that this will open things up. Certainly the articles selected for initial trial of this represent an opening, in that all the users who could edit before still can, and the ones that couldn't can now easily propose edits, ones that are likely to be accepted. William

Gregory Maxwell

3:22 a.m.

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 10:19 PM, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:

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On 06/14/2010 06:46 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:

On 15/06/2010, MuZemike<muzemike(a)gmail.com> wrote:

To be perfectly honest, I don't think anyone knows, it will probably depend on what policies are built around it.

People should really avoid the poisonous "propose" language. An edit is an edit. An act in completion by itself. For it to not stick it must be _reverted_, another act— not something passive. Perhaps it might sit unflagged for some time... but even in the worst case someone with the authority will eventually want their own changes to be displayed and at that point they must choose: revert or accept. Words matter, at least sometimes, and I fear "propose" presents problems both for the motivation of new users to contribute and in the personal restraint experienced users must display by avoiding the trap of OWNing articles.

William Pietri

3:38 a.m.

On 06/14/2010 08:22 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

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An edit is an edit. An act in completion by itself. For it to not stick it must be_reverted_, another act— not something passive. Perhaps it might sit unflagged for some time... but even in the worst case someone with the authority will eventually want their own changes to be displayed and at that point they must choose: revert or accept. Words matter, at least sometimes, and I fear "propose" presents problems both for the motivation of new users to contribute and in the personal restraint experienced users must display by avoiding the trap of OWNing articles.

Agreed 100%. Sorry for misspeaking. William

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

5:53 a.m.

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

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On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 10:19 PM, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:

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+1 Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

MuZemike

5:54 p.m.

From NetworkWorld.com, which I'm not sure they're painting a more positive or more negative picutre of pending changes: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/62518 -MuZemike On 6/14/2010 8:46 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:

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On 15/06/2010, MuZemike<muzemike(a)gmail.com> wrote:

To be perfectly honest, I don't think anyone knows, it will probably depend on what policies are built around it.

-MuZemike

Michael Peel

8:54 a.m.

On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:39, Risker wrote:

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On 14 June 2010 19:22, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.p… Spotted by Nihiltres.

Interesting - really? I was really hoping to see this tried to see whether it could work on such an article. Can you link me to the discussion about this, please? From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want are examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult question to answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b) even if it has, the community can change its mind at any time. ;-) Thanks, Mike

Andrew Gray

10:51 a.m.

On 15 June 2010 09:54, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:

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From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want are examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult question to answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b) even if it has, the community can change its mind at any time. ;-)

Someone proposed the daily FAs, which I think are an excellent idea from an exposure perspective, but I don't know whether that got the nod or not. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Thomas Dalton

6:14 p.m.

On 15 June 2010 11:51, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

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On 15 June 2010 09:54, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:

Someone proposed the daily FAs, which I think are an excellent idea from an exposure perspective, but I don't know whether that got the nod or not.

We don't currently protect FAs, do we? I thought we kept them unprotected and dealt with the inevitable vandalism, as a matter of principle (we're the encyclopaedia anyone can edit, so our most prominent article should be editable). I think the consensus is that pending changes should only be used (at least during the trial) on articles that would otherwise be protected.

Risker

6:15 p.m.

On 15 June 2010 04:54, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:

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On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:39, Risker wrote:

On 14 June 2010 19:22, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.p…

Spotted by Nihiltres.

<groan> The George Bush page is not going to be part of this trial, because there

no reasonable chance that the tiny, tiny percentage of useful edits will make up for all the vandalism and BLP violations that will be added. That was possibly the one thing that everyone working on the encyclopedia end

the trial came to agreement on very quickly.

I'm actually becoming increasingly concerned that the notion that the [[George W. Bush]] article would be unlocked has to be coming from somewhere within the organization, since it's being repeated in every single article in the press. This is not a good sign. The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press, it's to persuade the community that this is a useful and viable tool. Sticking it onto an article that will probably get more vandalism in an hour than all the rest of the pending changes articles put together will get in a week is hardly the way to persuade the community that it's a good investment of volunteer time and energy. This extension isn't being sold to the world at large, it's being sold to the community that will have to work with it. The current planned queue for implementation can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue There are plenty of good sound bites in just the first couple of days (World War I and II, Ronald McDonald, Winston Churchill, Rush Limbaugh) that would have made do quite nicely. Risker/Anne

Thomas Dalton

6:21 p.m.

On 15 June 2010 19:15, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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I believe I was the person that suggested the Bush article as an example when the BBC asked for one. I don't know where the articles that were published before the BBC article got the example from. I'm sorry if I was mistaken, but my understand is that this feature is intended precisely for articles like the Bush one.

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The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press, it's to persuade the community that this is a useful and viable tool.

I couldn't disagree more. The objective of this trial is to see if the feature is effective. This is a trial, not a marketing campaign. We shouldn't be skewing the parameters of the trial to get the result we want.

Gregory Maxwell

6:52 p.m.

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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On 15 June 2010 19:15, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press, it's to persuade the community that this is a useful and viable tool.

On this point I have to agree. Lets not _speculate_ that GWB would be a train-wreak. Lets try it, and see if we learn anything from the experience. If we already had all the answers we wouldn't have any problems. ;) Though I wouldn't recommend trying it _first_ nor would I recommend trying it while the press is talking about. Perhaps it would be an intolerable train wreak only because the press is spreading the name of that article around. It would be unfortunate if we reached incorrect conclusions on the effectiveness of pending vs protected on high traffic articles simply due to some temporary attention skew.

Andrew Gray

6:54 p.m.

On 15 June 2010 19:52, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Though I wouldn't recommend trying it _first_ nor would I recommend trying it while the press is talking about. Perhaps it would be an intolerable train wreak only because the press is spreading the name of that article around. It would be unfortunate if we reached incorrect conclusions on the effectiveness of pending vs protected on high traffic articles simply due to some temporary attention skew.

Mmm. If we've got a queue - an idea which I have to say I quite like, even if I was initially a bit confused by it - then why not schedule in some articles that we expect it not to work very well on? It could be it has unexpectedly less terrible effects. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Risker

7:50 p.m.

On 15 June 2010 14:54, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

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On 15 June 2010 19:52, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing protection. Myself, I'd generally be happy if we saw a 1:10 useful edit to vandalism ratio on most articles, but most articles aren't going to get that many edits anyway. There are some high-viewership articles in the early going, so we'll see pretty quickly how much of a difference the pending changes level makes. However, that same ratio isn't particularly workable if we're talking about an article that starts getting 50 or more edits a day, especially when the article involved is a {{good}} or {{featured}} article; remember that even 5 vandalism hits a day is almost invariably sufficient to semi-protect an article, not just because of the visible vandalism, but also because it is a huge waste of volunteer time, and it also impedes the continued improvement and maintenance of articles. Unfortunately, we don't have a way of keeping track of the number of pending changes that are (a) rejected as vandalism/BLP problem, (b) accepted directly into the article or (c) some other variation, such as putting the proposed edit onto the article talk page for discussion. I am hoping that we might be able to track how many pending edits are made by anonymous/newly registered editors versus autoconfirmed editors, though, and what percentage of edits by autoconfirmed editors winds up being held because of an earlier pending revision. We really do need some hard numbers here, so that the community can make informed decisions about the results of this trial. Risker/Anne I

Gregory Maxwell

8:47 p.m.

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing protection.

[snip] I couldn't disagree more strongly. If we were making a judgement on the basis of count of good edits to vandalism edits we would conclude that the best solution would be to protect everything— with the paradoxical effect of Wikipedia not existing at all. The reality is that the goodness of a good edit is so good relative to the baddness of a bad edit, mostly because of the tools and resources that we have to deal with bad edits, that we can pretty much disregard the vandalism side of that particular equation entirely. Undo/rollback are easy buttons, and we have many contributors who do nothing but remove obviously bad stuff (and some who, honestly, aren't qualified to do much else!). Without this truth Wikipedia simply couldn't work. The notion that the basic workload of dealing with simple vandalism (as opposed, say, the timeliness of the corrections or the quality of the articles in the interim) is a significant problem is unsupported by any objective measurement which I've seen, I'd love to see pointers suggesting otherwise. I've always believed that we use protection as a short term measure to preserve the quality of the articles displayed to readers (who are indifferent to our internal process) and the protection policy on Enwp is quite explicit that the purpose of protection is not pre-emptive ([[WP:NO-PREEMPT]]). I think it's characteristic of an 'administrative bias' to assume that protection is intended to be a workload reducer, if you're constantly dealing with the problem cases you're going to overestimate their magnitude. This concern also neglects the reduction in the incentive to vandalize that pending revisions ought to create. Whatever portion of the incentive to make trouble is related to the high visibility of the trouble should be reduced. Of course, we now have many troublemakers who don't care about visibility at all— they make trouble purely to irritate Wikipedians. But these WillyOnWheels class trouble makers are perfectly happy to make their trouble on less prominent pages which have never enjoyed persistent protection, since even obscure pages are fine for the purpose of irritating Wikipedians.

Cenarium sysop

17 Jun 17 Jun

2:16 a.m.

One observation on persistently heavily vandalized articles. It's worth to try pending changes on them. It may, and probably will, reduce to some extent the level of vandalism. If, however, the level of vandalism remains so high that it's counter-productive, i.e. wastes community resources for no sensible benefit of good edits, then we should use semi-protection. But we shouldn't think that it can't work and not try. On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:47 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

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On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing protection.

Ian Woollard

3:06 a.m.

IRC the evidence from the German trial was that it didn't reduce vandalism attempts much. Basically, unless it was something specific about the German trial, it looks like your average vandal is too unsophisticated to understand that their edits won't go live, or something. Still, we live in hopes. On the upside, it does at least mean that the attempts won't go live, and there's not much hurry to undo them. On 17/06/2010, Cenarium sysop <cenarium.sysop(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing protection.

_______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- -Ian Woollard

Michael Peel

15 Jun 15 Jun

7:53 p.m.

On 15 Jun 2010, at 19:15, Risker wrote:

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On 15 June 2010 04:54, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote: > From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want > are examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult > question to answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b) > even if it has, the community can change its mind at any time. ;-)

Taking a couple of pieces of Risker's reply shamelessly out of order...

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The current planned queue for implementation can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue There are plenty of good sound bites in just the first couple of days (World War I and II, Ronald McDonald, Winston Churchill, Rush Limbaugh) that would have made do quite nicely.

Is this the official (i.e. community-approved) list? I wasn't aware that there was a queue at all, although it's very sensible for there to be one so that the outcome can be analysed properly. It would have certainly been useful to have shared this more widely...

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The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press

I certainly wasn't intending to imply that it was - I made it very clear at the start of my paragraph that I was coming from a specific point of view. With pending changes, the press were going to cover this regardless - what we've* been trying to do is get the correct information out so that the media coverage is as accurate as possible. That is, for a given value of correct - it's difficult to be 100% accurate when things keep changing, or we discover new bits and pieces of information. ;-) * we, in this context, meaning those who are at the end of Wikipedia press contact numbers. I'm as eager as anyone to see how well pending changes works, purely on a quantitative basis, regardless of external coverage. I'm also eager to see how well it works on the entire spectrum of articles - those that will attract a lot of vandalism continuously, those that see bits and pieces at critical times, and those that have a mix of vandalism and constructive edits. Mike

Michael Peel

8:51 a.m.

BBC News have just run their story on this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10312095.stm Mike On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:22, David Gerard wrote:

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.p… Spotted by Nihiltres. - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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21 comments

11 participants

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participants (11)

Andrew Gray
Cenarium sysop
David Gerard
Gregory Maxwell
Ian Woollard
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Michael Peel
MuZemike
Risker
Thomas Dalton
William Pietri