[Foundation-l] Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

Hmm... Forwarding messages as attachments clearly doesn't work, either. 
Perhaps the third time will be the charm. Sorry for the mess.

William



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia
Date: 	Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:03:40 -0700
From: 	William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
To: 	announce-l at lists.wikimedia.org



As scheduled, Pending Changes went live on the English Wikipedia just 
after 4 pm Pacific (23:00 UTC) this afternoon!

The details of the trial are still being worked out by the English 
Wikipedia community, but it looks like they (or "you" as the case may 
be) will start off from a queue of carefully chosen pages [1] and see 
how to take it from there. For those who are interested in viewing the 
feature in the wild, Pending Changes is already enabled for, e.g, World 
War I [2] and Runescape [3]. Look in the top right corner for the 
pages-and-magnifying-glass icon.

Press coverage on this started yesterday with the BBC [4], and we've 
since received coverage in other sources in English (e.g., [5], [6]) and 
a variety of other languages. The coverage has, happily, been generally 
positive.

There were a few minor issues with the rollout, most of which have been 
resolved.  There are some minor UI issues that we will work through over 
the next few weeks, including some lively but good-natured opinions on 
the amount of yellow used. We'll be keeping a close eye on things over 
the next few days to make sure it all continues to go smoothly.

For those who want to get a sense of how the system is performing in 
terms of throughput (e.g., average time-to-approval), please visit the 
Pending Changes Stats page [7]. You'll also be able to browse pages 
needing review [8] and all pages with Pending Changes activated [9].

I want to thank the whole team involved on this, with special 
recognition to Aaron Schulz, the developer who has done the lion's share 
of the development. He has done great work, both in the development and 
in handling with the rollout.

William

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10312095.stm
[5] 
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.php 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/7829476/Wikipedia-rolls-out-pending-changes.html>
[6] http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/62518
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ValidationStatistics
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:OldReviewedPages
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:StablePages