[Foundation-l] Pending Changes: looking good for tonight

[William Pietri]

Just wanted to give everybody a quick update on Pending Changes. 
Basically, it looks like we're in good shape for going live on the 
English Wikipedia shortly.

We rolled the new code yesterday afternoon Pacific time. We've had a few 
hiccups, but everything seems well in hand. The biggest issue wasn't 
discovered until the wee hourss of the morning; the new code fought with 
a configuration issue on the Hebrew Wikisource, apparently breaking the 
wiki. (Sorry for that!) Domas Mituzas fixed the config and had 
everything back up within a few hours of the initial report. Other than 
that, there have been some small issues fixed promptly by Aaron, Chad, 
Ariel, Tomasz, and Tim.

There has also been some lively feedback on some interface changes 
designed to make unreviewed edits more obvious. Some projects would 
rather that they not be quite so attention-getting, and so have used 
local CSS changes to quiet them down a bit. That's not a showstopper, 
but we'll definitely be taking a look at that issue soon.


The next step will be to enable Pending Changes on the English 
Wikipedia. That will take place in an hour or two. We expect that to go 
more smoothly. No new code will go out; we're just turning on the 
extension used elsewhere, with a config that has been tested for the 
last 10 weeks on a labs site. Once everything is working and stable, 
we'll let everybody know.

After that, we expect to release updates weekly to the English 
Wikipedia. We have some interface improvements already in the queue, but 
will be listening carefully. to the community for feedback.

William

P.S. We'll be doing a retrospective afterward to see what lessons we can 
learn from this, so if you have feedback, please send me an off-list 
email and I'll make sure it gets incorporated.