Wikipedia:Pending changes/Request for Comment 2012/Option 3

Position #3

Pending changes should be kept in the long term, but the draft policy is insufficient and/or out of step with what the community wants from the tool. Pending changes should not be rejected entirely but should remain unused until such time as there is a more complete policy in place that has been explicitly approved by the community.

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users who endorse this position

I would like the draft policy to address: (1) the responsibilities of reviewers, more clearly, (2) the status of users who were previously given the reviewer right, and (3) the kinds of development improvements that will be requested of the developers. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:21, 23 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Tryptofish. I have not minded giving out a useless reviewer right. Now it is about to become meaningful. The policy should address this.--Wehwalt (talk) 20:43, 23 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea, but think it should only be used exceptionally. I'm worried about a huge backlog, and the drama that could ensue when a reviewer decides that an otherwise good-faith edit is rejected. It'll happen, and I fear it'll be hard to tell whether a reviewer was acting maliciously. Furthermore, new editors may perceive a chilling effect when they make a good-faith edit that's at odds with a reviewer's idea of a good-faith edit. I'm not sure if the ensuing drama from this technology will be less than the drama it solves. All in all, I just think there needs to be a whole lot more documentation on what's expected from a reviewer, and what's expected from an admin who has the option of choosing between prot and pending changes. Xavexgoem (talk) 00:42, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
We need further information on exactly how frequent the reviewer right will be. We also need a discussion of that PC-protected-level-1 pages will apparently be effectively blocked from (auto)confirmed user (without reviewer) editing so long as an edit remains in the reviewer queue. (This gives rather a motivation for committing vandalism - including not only "regular" vandalism but, say, highly POV material - as an autoconfirmed user, then putting in an edit (vandalism or innocent) as an IP address, to block any non-reviewer from fixing the vandalism.) How much the latter will matter will depend directly on how common the reviewer right will be. (I might favor PC if only the second level were used, as an alternative to full protection.) Allens (talk | contribs) 18:09, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I support PC, but the polarisation towards options one and two suggests to me that we haven't learned the lessons of the failure first time around. There are two broad groups of situations where pending changes is useful. One, where the vast majority of edits are good faith, but bad faith ones are causing exceptional damage. Two, where the vast majority of edits are bad faith, but the article nonetheless has a history of productive anon edits. Pending changes in its current form is a terrible solution on articles that attract a large number of good faith and bad faith contributions alike (current events, suspected deaths, extremely high profile figures etc). In a nutshell, the draft policy in option #2 does not give any guidance on the tool's strengths and limitations. It must. —WFC— 13:51, 30 March 2012 (UTC) (there is a third, important group PC is useful for that I omitted: very low traffic BLPs). —WFC— 14:20, 30 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The current draft policy will need to be revised before I can support reactivating Pending changes/Flagged revisions. To this end I recommend that WikiProject Flagged Revisions be reactivated (and if need be renamed WikiProject Pending Changes) to address the concerns of Tryptofish and Allens amoung others. – Allen4names 05:07, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
For pending changes, there needs to be a clear guide on what should and shouldn't use it, and when it's appropriate to add it to the article; it has to be at least remotely easy to use and navigate too, which it was far from. There are articles where pending changes would work wonders (years, schools), yet there are articles where they would be a waste of time. The two extremes above give me a bad gut feeling about how it's going to turn out, as deciding between none at all or them everywhere is a lose-lose situation. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 14:31, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I find myself in agreement with most of the comments in this section. FlaggedRevs needs both technical and policy adjustments to be effective here. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:50, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I saw it in action and, as it stood, did not see it as more useful than semi-protection. I think this is an answer looking for a question, although I can see the technology may be useful if the rationale for deploying it is rethought. Orderinchaos 03:55, 7 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I would argue that the draft in #2 contradicts what my experience with Pending Changes was. I would like to strongly agree with WFC above. Those indeed are the three situations in which I found PC to be incredibly useful. It was successful in removing semi protection from highly vandalized pages, that could still have useful contributions, ones in which articles had high quantities of good faith edits, and small detractors who could cause exceptional damage (generally violations of BLP/personal attacks, or simply factual errors introduced). Finally, the usage of the review system on low activity BLPs found reasonable success, in my view. I was able to unprotect numerous pages as a result. However, the policy above fails to account for much of this. Subcriteria 3 fails to address its strengths, and furthermore does not adequately address when it is not to be used, with the exception of the pre-emptively criteria. Although I am not sure what to think about this, especially on lesser edited BLPs, pre-emptive protection may have some merit. (I still have not entirely determined what that would be). Though Allens above provides a possible way to exploit the system, vandals have generally been disorganized enough such that this would not occur. Those that have been organized enough to do so generally require widespread action on behalf of the community, beyond the proposed usage of PC. Finally, the fact that the Reviewer right now holds a higher responsbility (I have no idea if this is for the better or the worse) compared to previously creates a whole new scenario. Should the reviewer right be removed en masse? What is the threshhold? It certainly is different than that of rollback, and although it could eventually be established, I fear that without hard guidelines the distribution of rollback is apt to cause unnecessary drama, and tons of legwork for admins. This is not to say PC could not be extremely useful. Given between option 2 and option 1, I would take option 2, but would prefer more thought be taken, and a thorough re-examination of the successes of the first PC trial be used. NativeForeigner ^Talk 03:40, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]