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

[Risker]

On 15 June 2010 02:38, Cenarium sysop <cenarium.sysop at gmail.com> wrote:

> To Risker:
>
> *Edits by reviewers to articles with pending changes are automatically
> accepted.
> NO, the reviewer has to manually accept the new revision, and you could
> have
> asked **before** creating this mountain of drama and FUD on enwiki, or
> tested the configuration yourself, or read the documentation, as this is
> stated very clearly in the tables at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes.
>


Actually, it was impossible to try on the testwiki at the time, because the
"reviewer" permission hadn't been activated yet.

And the tables clearly state that the edit must be "accepted". There was no
indication at the time in the documentation that any other option was
possible or acceptable, and no way to test it at the reviewer level.


>
> *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.
>


Can you please identify methods in which we can measure the improvement
here?  Are you proposing, even before the trial starts, to start including
articles that do not meet the criteria for page protection?  Let's be clear,
Cenarium; the trial is very specifically only to be used on pages that meet
the *current* criteria for page protection; what you're suggesting here is
something completely unrelated to the trial of pending changes in and of
itself.



>
> *Pending changes will encourage more non-editors to try to edit, and these
> new editors will become part of our community.
> Yes, and no. We may not gain considerably more editors, because it would
> concern a small number of articles, but every edit makes an editor, even if
> one-time. No to the second part, because every editor *is* a member of the
> community. The community is not only the most active editors. And yes,
> there
> are people trying to edit semi-protected pages, and in a constructive way.
> Since we modified the
> Protectedpagetext<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext
> >to
> make submitting edit requests more accessible, we've received many
> more,
> the vast majority of those are in good-faith, so there are definitely
> people
> out there trying to edit.
>

Those who are making good faith edits (or requesting them) *might* be
members of the community, but I'm not particularly inclined to include the
drive-by vandals as such.



>
> *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.
>

Remember, my list was made up of things that various people have proposed as
good reasons to institute pending changes. I completely agree with you that
it was never intended, but some people still think it was. I removed it from
the draft policy, in fact; I have no idea who added it in.


>
> *Anonymous editors will now be able to edit the [[George W. Bush]]  and
> [[Barack Obama]] articles.
> No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in
> the
> trial policy (scope section), that pages subject to too high levels of
> vandalism should not be protected with pending changes but classic
> protection.
>

Yes, indeed. Another place where we agree!  Unfortunately, the very first
press publication about this change specifically suggested that the [[George
W. Bush]] article would become accessible to unregistered and newly
registered editors.

I'm not the enemy here. I have something of a well-earned reputation as a
BLP absolutist and I spend a good part of every week addressing the fallout
of vandalism. But I've been around this project too long, and seen too many
exceedingly buggy software deployments and major attempts to hijack policy
and practice. I can turn a blind eye to a fair number of these, if they
don't affect matters within my usual area of assumed responsibility. This
one, however, is openly being billed as one thing (improved editing
accessibilty for non-registered and newly registered users on articles
they've previously been shut out of), but it's pretty obvious that there is
a significant desire to use this tool to do exactly the opposite, and
actually restrict automatically visible edits from non-registered and newly
registered users on a much larger swath of articles.

Keep the trial limited to articles that currently meet the protection
policy, and there is a reasonable chance of success. Start pushing it
further, and the outcome will be considerably more in doubt.

Risker/Anne