Help:Pending changes

This page explains the pending changes feature, to be introduced on Wikipedia as a trial on 14 June 2010.

Wikipedia remains after 10 years, an encyclopedia anyone can edit. While most articles are appropriately edited and over 3 million English articles have been written this way, Wikipedia editors constantly look for ways to reduce vandalism and obvious errors when they occur. A minority of articles are particularly susceptible - controversial or political topics, biographical articles affecting living people, breaking news, and popular targets of internet vandalism.

Pending changes is a tool that is being tested in a two-month trial. It is intended to prevent certain kinds of vandalism or inappropriate changes from ever reaching articles read by the wider public, or being seen outside the editing community, without interrupting the immediate editing experience which allows millions of people to enjoy contributing to Wikipedia.

What is 'Pending changes'?

Pending changes is a new system where articles with these kinds of problems can get the best of both worlds. Editing is allowed (and no longer prevented), but changes will be visible only to other editors until checked for obvious vandalism and clear errors. The public (99.5% of whom are not editors) will continue to see the latest checked version while new edits are awaiting a brief check. Immediately they are checked, the new changes will be visible to the non-editing public exactly as normal. Changes that are vandalism, inappropriate, or contain clear errors, are very unlikely to ever be visible to the wider (non-editing) public on these articles.

Reviewers are not experts and do not 'peer review' the articles they check. They are editors who have enough experience to identify obvious vandalism and other clear mistakes, and who are trusted to prevent them from being publicly visible on the few occasions they are not already caught by other means.

The new protection system is being tested on a small number of articles at first, to check its operation 'live' and allow the editing community to gradually become familiar. Articles affected will mainly be those where editing had to be prevented for days or indefinitely. We hope instead they can now gradually resume public editing and that the latest version will generally be visible to the public within minutes or at most a few hours, rather than only after many days or weeks.

What it means for readers

Most people won't notice pending changes, which will affect only a few thousand of the 3 million articles on Wikipedia. Viewing such an article, you'll see an extra tab: [SCREENSHOT OF RELEVANT TABS]. This means that some of the very latest edits are not shown because they are not yet checked for vandalism. The latest changes can be viewed by clicking the "pending changes" tab. Usually the displayed article will be very similar - the latest changes may be quite minor matters such as punctuation.

Pending changes ensures that articles being targeted for vandalism or other serious issues are much less likely to be affected or show inappropriate information as a result.

If you want to regularly see the changes which are awaiting checking in the latest version (whatever they may be), please log in and create an account (it's free and you don't even have to give an email address!). If you do this, you will be able to set as an option in your preferences whether to see the latest checked version, or the latest version being edited, on such articles.

What it means for editors

The vast majority of articles are not managed using 'Pending changes', and editing is unchanged and exactly as usual.

Articles that are under 'Pending changes' are shown to you and edited exactly as normal (including all normal anti-vandalism, NPP and RC patrols, bots, and similar endeavors). The only difference is that the version shown publicly to non-editors (including logged-out editors) will sometimes be a slightly older one, until newer changes are checked by a reviewer. But this doesn't affect your editing. You can be a reviewer! if you want (see below). The main requirement is a reasonable and modest track record as an editor, or existing access to rollback (which has a similar level of trust). As a reviewer your own edits, and those of others you check, are immediately tagged as suitable for public view. Widespread reviewer access is desirable.

If you find yourself routinely editing, you can create an account which will let you specify whether you want to see the latest checked or unchecked version. Logged out, you will always see the latest checked revision initially if the page has 'pending changes' in use.

How does the pending changes review process work?

Main pages: Help:Pending changes review process and Becoming a reviewer

This diagram should be replaced with something simpler

Administrators can, upon request, tagged (or untagged) any page as using 'Pending revisions'. Targets include pages with a recent history of vandalism or inappropriate changes, or pages on breaking news stories (such as deaths, inaccurate internet rumors, and inappropriate media claims) that might attract inappropriate changes. Initially a limit of 2000 articles will be set. Diverse use is desired, but preference may be given to pages likely to provide useful trial feedback.

A reviewer is an ordinary editor who can check that the latest version of an article visible to editors is also fit for the public. (Become a reviewer!) If it is fit for public viewing, he or she tells the software it's been checked (or 'accepted'). If it isn't he or she can choose to fix the obvious issues, and then that latest version will be considered checked. In both cases the latest version checked will be immediately shown to all our Wikipedia readers worldwide.

The reviewer is not necessarily a subject expert nor is this 'peer review', so their review is not a guarantee in any way of an error free article. Their role is to catch and filter obvious vandalism and obviously inappropriate edits, on articles which are prone to these, and where automated checking and prevention of editing are considered less effective or less 'open' solutions that impede the ability of well--meaning members of the public to improve the articles, and readers to enjoy learning from them.

This process does not affect editing. All edits will be visible immediately to editors and be shown in page history and user contributions, and all editing is of the latest edited version and the latest changes. The only effect is that non-editors (99.5% of users) viewing a 'pending changes' article will see the latest checked version unless they choose otherwise.

Why is this feature being introduced?

Wikipedia has historically protected readers from seeing very inappropriate changes by a combination of automated checking and fixing tools, manual checking, and in exceptional cases, page protection tools that can prevent edits from all users or all unknown users. (See editorial oversight and control for more)

However in some cases these are not considered sufficient for a world class reference work in 2010. Some changes cannot be machine detected; preventing public editing on a topic to stop vandalism (especially for a long period) is a serious source of disruption itself and frustrates our hundreds of thousands of well-behaved editors; and manual checking may briefly leave inappropriate information in public view (although usually only for seconds or minutes).

'Pending changes' is an implementation of the highly configurable 'flagged revisions' extension in use on other Wikimedia projects, customized for the current needs of English Wikipedia. It is the first trial of that tool on this wiki.