Wikipedia introduces a new feature named Pending Changes
TechWhack (blog)
Wikipedia has announced a new feature named Pending Changes. This is going to be used for pages which are generally locked for edits. ...

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They should call it Pending Paradigm Changes.

It is interesting that instead of being an increased restriction, it is being sold as a mechanism to decrease control on articles.

Somehow though, I am not sure the Jimbo article edits will make it through the process, however well sauced.

Mods, could we just get these comments into a generic "Pending Changes" discussion thread, unrelated to the (often flawed) news stories about it?

I would like to add a question -- which accounts will be allowed to approve a given "pending change"? I read about "senior editors", but there is no such thing, is there? Are we talking about admins, or merely confirmed (4 days, 10 edits) accounts? I have some confirmed accounts, so this could be fun.

I think it is slowly emerging in my mind as to what is so wrong about this approach to implementing flagged revisions.

Previously, on contentious pages, admins had the luxury of being able to say blindly that they were not going to take sides and were going to stop everything until things calmed down. Even if admins added stuff to a locked page, they could delegate responsibility to only accepting "consensus" established on the talk page.

Now, admins are going to be charged with judging individual edits without having an understanding of their implications, or alternatively they are going to be "involved" admins, and bring admins into conflict as they may appear to be biased in allowing some edits through rather than others.

It strikes me that of all the ways to implement to encourage failure, starting on pages where there has never been any (real) consensus on presentation is a good way to undermine the system, rather than refining techniques and understanding on less controversial pages. One suspects there may be malice in their method.

The links don't work for me. Has anything been implemented or is this more vapor reports?

Supposedly, the "new" feature gets rolled out later tonight.

I've fixed the link - it seems there is something broken about goole news feed links at the moment.

Greg, I could move it, but we have discussed flag revisions at length. I think the interest here is in the portrayal of these as a way of freeing up contentious articles rather than locking them down - I suspect that this is designed to pacify the community.

When we see them in action, we can then discuss the reality of the changes rather than simply speculate.

The BBC site has a screen shot explaining the change.

That has been Jimmy's line all along. Semiprotection was also presented as an "increase" in editorial freedom.

Yes if this "innovation" to supposedly widen the editing door fails the opponents of FR will pick up on the very obvious similarities to argue that FR couldn't possibly work.

So, the subtle difference this time around appears to be that the WMF's PR crew have decided to try doing it Jimbo's way from the get-go, i.e., in the actual press release itself, rather than present it as "quality control" and "trying to make Wikipedia more accurate." That latter approach plays well in the media, but clearly not to the WP Faithful who are the real target demographic.

In other words, they've finally realized that to make this work, they have to sell this to the "community" rather than the general public, because the community is far more resistant to any kind of change than the public is, especially change that might reduce their ability to do whatever they heck they want. Unfortunately, this spin attempt is now so transparent (due mostly to its familiarity), it's probably not going to fool any WP'ers. If anything, they'll consider both the name change and the change in PR's approach to be an insult to their intelligence, when in fact it's more of an admission of past failure in the face of near-total intransigence.

I'd also agree with what Mr. Dogbiscuit suggests, i.e., it's clear enough to me that by doing a "trial run" for the feature on politically and socially contentious articles, rather than what they should be using it on (BLP's, and articles about which there have been legal issues or direct complaints from affected parties), they're sabotaging the idea in the same way you might deep-six a brand-new defensive weapons system by publicly "testing" your initial prototype in live combat (with plenty of news cameras around). Whether this is deliberate or simply a display of oblivious incompetence is anyone's guess - we know they're fully capable of both.

Anyhoo... they've been milking the PR benefit of this idea for almost 5 years, long enough for even the laziest journalists to realize they've been led down the primrose path, so now the WMF has (correctly) surmised that they have to deliver something ASAP or else start losing what little public credibility they might still have left. The culture of free revenge and defamation won't go down without a fight, but personally I'm going to be optimistic here and say that once WP users see this in operation (assuming they haven't built some technical glitch or other limitation into it), even on the most "troublesome" content, they're going to wonder why they stalled so long.

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But will they choreograph the rumble, as in West Side Story?