[Foundation-l] Pending Changes update for July 28

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

It's been a little while since I've sent out an update (sorry about that).
 The Pending Changes trial continues apace, with 1,382 articles configured
to use the feature as of this writing.

Most of the work on the software that powers Pending Changes is focused on
refactoring and stability.  Some of the performance problems associated with
this feature have been fixed, and we believe we have fixed all of the
user-visible performance problems.  Looking at our backend systems, there's
some areas where this feature is still causing more load than it should,
which is where our work is focused now.

Aaron Schulz, who has done the lion's share of the development to date
(thanks Aaron!) continues to stay involved, but at a much reduced level as
he focuses on non-Wikimedia stuff, while Chad Horohoe ramps up.

We'll be publishing some statistics soon which outline per page metrics on
revisions under Pending Changes.  Nimish Gautam and Devin Finzer (Devin is
an intern that is working for Wikimedia Foundation this summer) are working
on some statistics that they'll be publishing soon.  More discussion is
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Metrics

It will be time for a vote soon about whether to keep Pending Changes
enabled on en.wikipedia.org.  We'll be pinging folks in the community about
the post-trial discussion.  If we're rigidly following the proposal, the
trial will end on August 15, regardless of whether a vote has happened.
 However, we're probably already running late for making a decision by then.
 For a variety of operational reasons, we plan to leave the feature running
while the community decides whether to keep the feature on, assuming that
process lasts no more than a month or so after August 15.

The main discussion area for this feature is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Feedback

If you have comments/suggestions/questions, that's a good place to post
them.

Rob