[WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Cenarium sysop wrote:
> To Risker:
>
>
> *Pending changes will help to reduce visibility of vandalism and BLP
> violations
> Yes, classic protection is way too rigid for Wikipedia today, and has always
> been too rigid. The flexibility of pending changes protection will allow to
> use protection where needed, and only where needed, more than classic
> protection would have ever allowed on its own. The protection policy allows
> for a considerable amount of discretion, and it is evident that
> administrators in general would be more willing to apply pending changes
> protection on articles subject to vandalism or BLP violations than they
> would otherwise have been with the rigid semi-protection. As long as we can
> keep up with the backlog, this is a win-win situation.
>   
This is a very dangerous view on the issue. This is what people
who strenously opposed the new mechanism were most afraid
of, and the supporters originally said would not be a danger.
If this really happened, I could easily see many of the people
originally in support of the new mechanism, could do a full
volte-face and come strongly in opposition of the mechanism.

Supporters of the original agreement often voiced the proviso
that using the mechanism for semied/BLP's or whatever their
personal threshold was, would never ever be a thin end of the
wedge to spread things out to things we wouldn't semi currently.
That is the *old* *agreement* on this issue. A huge drive by any
tiny group of blow-hard editors to expand use of the mechanism
beyond what we currently semi, could back-fire spectacularly.

I don't dispute that in the fullness of time; years or decades
from now, it might eventually go that route, but that is a
completely different issue, and I suspect there would be
many more important community supported initiatives that
would have to be accepted in the interim, before that could
remotely be acceptable.


>
> *Pending changes will help with disputes.
> No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in the
> trial policy (scope section), that pending changes protection, level 1 or 2,
> should not be used on pages subject to disputes.
>
>   

I agree with your point here. The mechanism shouldn't be used
as a damper in edit wars. That way, madness lies. You could have
hundreds of reverts back and forth never going live, and a Stygian
Stable for the person sorting out through all that which revisions
and edits to go live finally. Just a total Charlie Foxtrot in other words.



Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen