[WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Pending Changes update for July 28

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 9:55 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>  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.
>
> Wanted to expand on this point a bit. The justification is that turning
> off Pending Changes is quite a bit of work and would clutter the logs
> (all of the Pending Changes pages would be Semi-Protected so they're
> not all immediate targets for vandalism).
>
> It would be a lot of work with no net benefit if the community decides
> to keep the feature on. This applies to both the operations staff as well
> as the community (they would have to mark everything with pending
> changes again after it was reactivated). If the community decides to
> not keep the feature, a little extra time of leaving it on during the
> discussion period wouldn't hurt--and would give people a chance to do
> some last-minute evaluation if they're on the fence.

Sounds reasonable. You will have to very firmly commit to turning it
off immediately if the vote/discussion goes against it though, as some
will (despite the reasonable explanation given here) see this as a
back-door route to keeping it on by default. One question I do have is
how much attention is given to the main talk page at WT:PEND? The
impression I get is that most of the discussion is happening
elsewhere, and some people will miss that discussion if there are not
pointers from that talk pages to the talk pages of the subpages.

Carcharoth