Hi everyone,
There is mounting demand for a "reject" button (or "decline") in several conversations about Pending Changes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Feedback#Unapprove_bu...
...along with a lot of confusion about "unaccept": http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Pending_Changes_issues#... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes#Unaccept_on_Erne... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes#I_don.27t_get_it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Pending_changes#Can.27t_get_it_to_wor...
The solution we've proposed is a "reject" button which would replace the "unaccept" button in most contexts: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Reject_Pending_Revision
However, there are some misgivings about implementing such a feature: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_talk:Reject_Pending_Rev...
In short, the worry is that a convenient "reject" button will cause editors to introduce changes they never intended to introduce. The way that we need to implement "reject" is to undo all edits between the rejected revision and the latest accepted revision. Before we plow ahead and implement this, we'd like to get some developer feedback on this.
For example, let's say that there are three pending revisions in the queue. That means there is the latest accepted revision (we'll call "A1"), and three pending revisions ("P1", "P2", and "P3"). P3 is the latest pending revision, while P1 and P2 are intermediate pending revisions.
The specification says that when viewing the diff between A1 and P3, the "reject" button is enabled. A more conservative school of thought says that the "reject" button shouldn't be enabled, because its possible that P1 was a valid revision that was vandalized by P2, and the only way to tell is to look at the revision history. However, this should be reasonably rare, and the diff remains in the edit history to be rescued, and can be reapplied if need be. A competing problem is that disabling the "reject" button will result in the same confusion we're already seeing today.
Thoughts?
Rob