[WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Ian Woollard]

IRC the evidence from the German trial was that it didn't reduce
vandalism attempts much.

Basically, unless it was something specific about the German trial, it
looks like your average vandal is too unsophisticated to understand
that their edits won't go live, or something.

Still, we live in hopes.

On the upside, it does at least mean that the attempts won't go live,
and there's not much hurry to undo them.

On 17/06/2010, Cenarium sysop <cenarium.sysop at gmail.com> wrote:
> One observation on persistently heavily vandalized articles.
>
> It's worth to try pending changes on them. It may, and probably will, reduce
> to some extent the level of vandalism.
>
> If, however, the level of vandalism remains so high that it's
> counter-productive, i.e. wastes community resources for no sensible benefit
> of good edits, then we should use semi-protection.
>
> But we shouldn't think that it can't work and not try.
>
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:47 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough
>> > encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing
>> > protection.
>> [snip]
>>
>> I couldn't disagree more strongly.  If we were making a judgement on
>> the basis of count of good edits to vandalism edits we would conclude
>> that the best solution would be to protect everything— with the
>> paradoxical effect of Wikipedia not existing at all.
>>
>> The reality is that the goodness of a good edit is so good relative to
>> the baddness of a bad edit, mostly because of the tools and resources
>> that we have to deal with bad edits, that we can pretty much disregard
>> the vandalism side of that particular equation entirely.
>> Undo/rollback are easy buttons, and we have many contributors who do
>> nothing but remove obviously bad stuff (and some who, honestly, aren't
>> qualified to do much else!).   Without this truth Wikipedia simply
>> couldn't work.
>>
>>
>> The notion that the basic workload of dealing with simple vandalism
>> (as opposed, say, the timeliness of the corrections or the quality of
>> the articles in the interim) is a significant problem is unsupported
>> by any objective measurement which I've seen, I'd love to see pointers
>> suggesting otherwise. I've always believed that we use protection as a
>> short term measure to preserve the quality of the articles displayed
>> to readers (who are indifferent to our internal process) and the
>> protection policy on Enwp is quite explicit that the purpose of
>> protection is not pre-emptive ([[WP:NO-PREEMPT]]).
>>
>> I think it's characteristic of an 'administrative bias' to assume that
>> protection is intended to be a workload reducer, if you're constantly
>> dealing with the problem cases you're going to overestimate their
>> magnitude.
>>
>> This concern also neglects the reduction in the incentive to vandalize
>> that pending revisions ought to create.  Whatever portion of the
>> incentive to make trouble is related to the high visibility of the
>> trouble should be reduced.
>>
>> Of course, we now have many troublemakers who don't care about
>> visibility at all— they make trouble purely to irritate Wikipedians.
>> But these WillyOnWheels class trouble makers are perfectly happy to
>> make their trouble on less prominent pages which have never enjoyed
>> persistent protection, since even obscure pages are fine for the
>> purpose of irritating Wikipedians.
>>
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-- 
-Ian Woollard