Wikipedia:Pending changes
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As part of a Request for Comment on pending-changes protection, a third phase considered its use in the short term. In accordance with consensus it was removed from all articles on Friday, 20 May 2011, with no prejudice against future reinstatement, in some form, based upon consensus and discussion.
See also: Final comments by the closing administrator |
| Pending changes Help · Reviewing · Original proposal · Trial specifics · Metrics · Feedback · Closure · Straw poll · Straw poll on interim usage · Testing · Technical issues · Bugs · Pages with pending edits · All pages on trial · Pending changes log · Advanced review log · RFC 2011 |
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This page in a nutshell: Pending changes provides an alternative to page protection for articles. Its use is limited by policy. |
Pending changes (PC) is a tool that underwent a two-month trial on the English Wikipedia in 2010. A straw poll at the end of the trial, which closed on September 4, 2010, showed 407 in favor of implementation in some measure and 217 opposed, with 44 other responses. Among those in favor, there was no clear consensus as to what form the implementation should take. PC remains active on a few test pages, but has been removed from article pages as a result of an RfC that closed in May 2011. During this RfC, 127 supported its removal, and 65 opposed. The removal of pending changes does not prejudice reinstating it in the future, in some form, based upon consensus and discussion.
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[edit] Description
At present, several thousand (0.1%) of the 3.3 million pages on the English Wikipedia are semi-protected to reduce the risk of inappropriate editing. PC introduces new protection levels that can be used as an alternative to semi-protection and full protection. Unregistered and new users can edit pages protected by pending changes, while they cannot edit semi-protected pages, but their edits are not visible to readers unless accepted by a reviewer.
During the trial, the conditions in which PC could be used were the same as for traditional protection, as determined by the protection policy. Changes made by unregistered or newly registered users became visible to non-logged-in readers only after being checked for vandalism and clear errors. Both logged-in users and anonymous users who clicked the "edit this page" tab edited the latest version as usual. Any pending changes on such pages were visible to all users via an additional "pending changes" tab. See Help:Pending changes.
[edit] Scope, deployment, and removal
| Unregistered, New | Autoconfirmed, Confirmed | Reviewer | Administrator | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No protection | can edit; visible immediately; no acceptance required |
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| Pending-changes level 1 protection |
can edit; changes need acceptance to be visible; cannot accept |
can edit; visible immediately*; cannot accept |
can edit; visible immediately*; can accept |
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| Pending-changes level 2 protection |
can edit; changes need acceptance to be visible; cannot accept |
can edit; visible immediately*; can accept |
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| Semi-protection | cannot edit | can edit; visible immediately; no acceptance required |
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| Pending-changes level 2 with Semi-protection | cannot edit | can edit; changes need acceptance to be visible; cannot accept |
can edit; visible immediately*; can accept |
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| Full protection | cannot edit | can edit; visible immediately*; no acceptance required |
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| *These changes are visible immediately if no previous pending changes remain to be accepted. | ||||
Admins may use their discretion to add PC protection on pages where the disruption to good-faith editing caused by existing protection tools would be disproportionate to the problem the protection seeks to resolve. If an article placed under pending changes is subject to substantial levels of vandalism, semi-protection should be used instead. Pending changes should not be used in content disputes, because like semi-protection it disadvantages certain good faith editors. For the first week of the trial, only articles listed at Wikipedia:Pending changes/Queue were protected under pending changes. For the rest of the trial, pending-changes protection was applied in accordance with the protection policy, limited by a progressively increased cap. Removal of pending-changes protection can be requested of any administrator, or at requests for unprotection.
[edit] Reviewing
The process of reviewing is intended as a quick check to ensure edits don't contain vandalism, violations of the policy on living people, or other obviously inappropriate content. Reviewers are users sufficiently experienced who are granted the ability to accept other users' edits. They are expected to have a reasonable editing history, distinguish what is and what is not vandalism, and be familiar with basic content policies. Reviewer rights are granted by administrators and in cases of misuse of the right or to protect Wikipedia from possible misuse, can be removed by an administrator. The permission can also be removed at the request of the user, the community, or the arbitration committee.
[edit] Backlog management
The backlog of unreviewed changes should remain at reasonable levels both in volume of articles and average time in processing changes. When the backlog gets excessive, articles under pending changes for which it makes most sense should depending on their situation be transitioned to semi-protection, or be unprotected. Backlog management should be coordinated at a community level. (Discussion on this)
[edit] Results
The data collected during the trial proved that pending changes was an effective method of permitting new and unregistered users to make improvements to previously semi-protected articles, while preventing vandalism and other bad edits from being displayed to users. See Wikipedia:Pending changes/Metrics/Anonymous edit quality and related pages for further details.
Most changes were reviewed within minutes, indicating that the community is easily able to manage the workload produced by this trial. At any given point in time, the pending changes queue normally listed fewer than 10 articles in need of review. Whether it could currently handle 100 to 1,000 times the number of edits (e.g., to place all BLPs under pending changes) is questionable.
In general, high-traffic, high-vandalism pages were probably not appropriate choices for pending changes; in those cases, regular semi-protection was probably the more efficient choice. Low-traffic pages and pages whose need for semi-protection was unclear were probably the best candidates for pending changes.
[edit] See also
- Help:Pending changes
- Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions: The original proposal, partially implemented in this trial, approved in this poll.
- Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions
