[WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Michael Peel]

On 15 Jun 2010, at 19:15, Risker wrote:

> On 15 June 2010 04:54, Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net> wrote:
>> From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want
>> are examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult
>> question to answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b)
>> even if it has, the community can change its mind at any time. ;-)

Taking a couple of pieces of Risker's reply shamelessly out of order...

> The current planned queue for implementation can be found here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue
> 
> There are plenty of good sound bites in just the first couple of days (World
> War I and II, Ronald McDonald, Winston Churchill, Rush Limbaugh) that would
> have made do quite nicely.

Is this the official (i.e. community-approved) list? I wasn't aware that there was a queue at all, although it's very sensible for there to be one so that the outcome can be analysed properly. It would have certainly been useful to have shared this more widely...

> The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press

I certainly wasn't intending to imply that it was - I made it very clear at the start of my paragraph that I was coming from a specific point of view.

With pending changes, the press were going to cover this regardless - what we've* been trying to do is get the correct information out so that the media coverage is as accurate as possible. That is, for a given value of correct - it's difficult to be 100% accurate when things keep changing, or we discover new bits and pieces of information. ;-)

* we, in this context, meaning those who are at the end of Wikipedia press contact numbers.

I'm as eager as anyone to see how well pending changes works, purely on a quantitative basis, regardless of external coverage. I'm also eager to see how well it works on the entire spectrum of articles - those that will attract a lot of vandalism continuously, those that see bits and pieces at critical times, and those that have a mix of vandalism and constructive edits.

Mike