[Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27

[Michael Snow]

  On 9/29/2010 7:00 PM, Risker wrote:
> On 29 September 2010 21:07, Jimmy Wales<jwales at wikia-inc.com>  wrote:
>>   On 9/28/10 7:41 PM, Risker wrote:
>>> Yes it is, and it's an important one.  Several of us had already been
>>> working on a plan for the second trial, and those of us discussing had
>>> widely agreed that it would be much more likely to be successful if more of the recommendations on improving the software were incorporated, thus our
>>> recommendation that it not proceed so rapidly.
>> I respect what you are saying here, very much.  But I think the right
>> approach is always "release early, release often".  There is no need to
>> rush, but there is also no reason not to release fixes as they are
>> available, because there is no particular "ship date" with marketing, etc.
> Jimmy, here's where you're wrong.  The first version was marketed as the
> solution that would allow the [[George W. Bush]] article to be publicly
> edited - it was marketed that way on and off wiki - and instead we had 40
> hours of non-stop IP vandalism and browser crashes for almost every
> reviewer.
Whether or not it was reasonable to expect the feature to solve this 
problem on the first try, I don't think we should settle for that as our 
goal. This particular kind of case is mostly driven by media appeal and 
is not the best objective to focus on for accomplishing our mission. 
What the English Wikipedia really needs is to be able to reverse the 
situation that has prevailed since the Seigenthaler incident, so that 
people can write new articles and material without having to create an 
account or endure a waiting period, and the project can stay closer to 
the notion of being an encyclopedia anyone can edit. For me, any 
attraction that developing a "flagged revisions" or "pending changes" 
feature has ever had is connected to the potential that it would lead to 
an environment in which we can restore that ability for unregistered 
contributors.

--Michael Snow