[WikiEN-l] Problem with the pending changes review screen.

[FT2]

As I understand it, and apologies if mistaken, all of this is based on a
misunderstanding of the tool.

A reviewer faced with any mix of edits and wishing to "do something" (ie not
ignore it all) has two main choices.

They can accept the most recent edit, or they can add an edit of their own
(which could be a revert or a "fix" of problem edits).

In either case, the latest edit is presumed good quality (because they are
doing it) and it becomes "accepted".

The misunderstanding, as I understand it, is that pending changes doesn't
care about any intervening edits or unchecked page history. If there had
been 1000 edits since the last accepted revision, or 30 but all vandalism,
none of that matters. The aim of the tool is to ensure the public (ie
/latest/) version is presentable. It doesn't care for or censor historic
revisions. Once a revision is no longer current, then whether it was
accepted, reverted, unchecked or the like in the past is immaterial. The
vandalism and good edits remain in the page history as normal, users can see
them, revert them, sort out complex mixes of vandalism/non-vandalism as much
as they like. Past "good" edits are no more "lost" than they ever were.  The
purpose of pending changes is to ensure the current presented version will
be presentable to non-editors and logged-out users - nothing more.

FT2

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 4:30 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Imagine an article with many revisions and pending changes enabled:
> > A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
> [snip]
> > I don't know how to fix this. We could remove the reject button to
> > make it more clear that you use the normal editing functions (with
> > their full power) to reject.  But I must admit that the easy rollback
> > button is handy there.   Alternatively we could put a small chunk of
> > the edit history on the review page, showing the individual edits
> > which comprise the span-diff (bonus points for color-coding if someone
> > wants to make a real programming project out of it) along with the
> > undo links and such.
> [snip]
>
>
> Further discussion with Risker has caused me to realize that there is
> another significant problem situation with the reject button.
>
> Consider the following edit sequence:
>
> A, B, C, D, E
>
>
> A is a previously approved version.  B, and D are all excellent edits.
>  C and E are obvious vandalism.  E even managed to undo all the good
> changes of B,D while adding the vandalism.
>
> A reviewer hits the pending revisions link in order to review, they
> get the span diff from A to E.  All they see is vandalism, there is no
> indication of the redeeming edits in the intervening span.  So they
> hit reject.  The good edits are lost.
>
>
> Unlike the prior problem, the only way to solve this would be only
> display the REJECT button if all of the pending changes are by the
> same author (or limiting it to only one pending change in the span,
> which would be slightly more conservative but considering the
> behaviour of the rollback button I think the group-by-author behaviour
> would be fine).   The accept button is still safe.
>
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