It's the problem of the English Wikipedia not knowing what it wanted
aside
from knowing it wanted something. Some wanted stable revisions (an approved form of an article), others wanted protection but editable, others
wanted
enhanced review of content before publishing, etc. Pending changes, as
a
software package, is a bit of an amalgamation of all the things the community requested. Unfortunately, we never agreed on what exactly it
was
supposed to be. The Foundation put plenty of resources in the product,
but
we were like a focus group trying to describe the perfect product
without
any concrete idea of what we were missing with the product we had.
Sad, really.
Any chance it would be agreed in the future? There are at least three working versions on big projects, German, Polish, and Russian Wikipedias (though I believe in Russian Wikipedia it was recently killed by users trying to set records and consequently reviewing 500 articles per hour, but at least the idea was nice and worthwhile to discuss); it has also been implemented on smaller-scale projects like Hebrew or Hungarian Wikipedias and other projects. Anybody wanted to hear how it works over there? My impression as a user of pending changes tool for three years was that it is a really convenient tool saving editors a lot of time and capable of giving the readers an idea on the state of the article.
Cheers Yaroslav