[Foundation-l] Pending Changes

[geni]

On 28 September 2010 23:37, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Decisions at Wikipedia are not based a vote.  The majority support
> Pending Changes and insufficient reasons have been put forwards by
> those who wish to see it quashed. I would like to thank Erik Moeller
> for the difficult discussion he has made. It is impossible to make
> everyone happy sometimes.
>
> I support PC for a number of reasons including.
>
> 1) Concerns are voiced both by academia and our readership regarding
> Wikipedia's reliability. Pending changes addresses some of these
> concerns. Thus there is a good chance that "pending changes" will not
> only increase our readership but the number of people who edit. No one
> wants to put in the work to create something good or excellent just to
> have it vandalized and left un-repaired.
>
> 2) Vandals like to see their work go "live". Pending changes stops
> this and will thus potentially decrease the entire volume of
> vandalism.  Most vandals will not be willing to pit in the effort to
> get around these measures.

We had to destroy the wiki in order to save it.

We've probably got one of the best reader:complaints about accuracy
ratio going for any widely read work.
The complaints from academia are not addressed by PC and the only
project that does address them (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
has fewer than 2K entries.

There is little evidence that people who were genuinely going to edit
are put off by vandalism. New editors also like to see their work go
live take that away and you lose their effort.

But then we had to destroy the wiki in order to save it.

> 3) We will have a tool to allow the world to seamlessly contribute to
> a greater part of Wikipedia. Instead of semi protecting some pages (
> and thus making it difficult for IPs to contribution ) we can use PC
> to make Wikipedia more open per our founding principles.

One of the relatively few conclusions anyone has managed to draw from
the trial is that PC as a replacement for semi protect doesn't really
work.

Additionally if it was actually seamless it wouldn't impact vandalism.

-- 
geni