Re: [WikiEN-l] Problem with the pending changes review screen.

[Risker]

The crux of this issue is that to revert individual edits one has to go to
the page history, the pending changes review window does not permit this.

Gmaxwell and I have worked out a step-by-step process for even the least
technical reviewer to follow.  You can find it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Reviewing#Step-by-step_.22how-to.22_for_reviewing_multiple_edits

Best,

Risker/Anne

On 16 June 2010 00:25, FT2  wrote:

> As I understand it, and apologies if mistaken, all of this is based on a
> misunderstanding of the tool.
>
> A reviewer faced with any mix of edits and wishing to "do something" (ie
> not
> ignore it all) has two main choices.
>
> They can accept the most recent edit, or they can add an edit of their own
> (which could be a revert or a "fix" of problem edits).
>
> In either case, the latest edit is presumed good quality (because they are
> doing it) and it becomes "accepted".
>
> The misunderstanding, as I understand it, is that pending changes doesn't
> care about any intervening edits or unchecked page history. If there had
> been 1000 edits since the last accepted revision, or 30 but all vandalism,
> none of that matters. The aim of the tool is to ensure the public (ie
> /latest/) version is presentable. It doesn't care for or censor historic
> revisions. Once a revision is no longer current, then whether it was
> accepted, reverted, unchecked or the like in the past is immaterial. The
> vandalism and good edits remain in the page history as normal, users can
> see
> them, revert them, sort out complex mixes of vandalism/non-vandalism as
> much
> as they like. Past "good" edits are no more "lost" than they ever were.
>  The
> purpose of pending changes is to ensure the current presented version will
> be presentable to non-editors and logged-out users - nothing more.
>
> FT2
>
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 4:30 AM, Gregory Maxwell 
> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Gregory Maxwell 
> > wrote:
> > > Imagine an article with many revisions and pending changes enabled:
> > > A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
> > [snip]
> > > I don't know how to fix this. We could remove the reject button to
> > > make it more clear that you use the normal editing functions (with
> > > their full power) to reject.  But I must admit that the easy rollback
> > > button is handy there.   Alternatively we could put a small chunk of
> > > the edit history on the review page, showing the individual edits
> > > which comprise the span-diff (bonus points for color-coding if someone
> > > wants to make a real programming project out of it) along with the
> > > undo links and such.
> > [snip]
> >
> >
> > Further discussion with Risker has caused me to realize that there is
> > another significant problem situation with the reject button.
> >
> > Consider the following edit sequence:
> >
> > A, B, C, D, E
> >
> >
> > A is a previously approved version.  B, and D are all excellent edits.
> >  C and E are obvious vandalism.  E even managed to undo all the good
> > changes of B,D while adding the vandalism.
> >
> > A reviewer hits the pending revisions link in order to review, they
> > get the span diff from A to E.  All they see is vandalism, there is no
> > indication of the redeeming edits in the intervening span.  So they
> > hit reject.  The good edits are lost.
> >
> >
> > Unlike the prior problem, the only way to solve this would be only
> > display the REJECT button if all of the pending changes are by the
> > same author (or limiting it to only one pending change in the span,
> > which would be slightly more conservative but considering the
> > behaviour of the rollback button I think the group-by-author behaviour
> > would be fine).   The accept button is still safe.
> >
> > ___
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> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Problem with the pending changes review screen.

[FT2]

As I understand it, and apologies if mistaken, all of this is based on a
misunderstanding of the tool.

A reviewer faced with any mix of edits and wishing to "do something" (ie not
ignore it all) has two main choices.

They can accept the most recent edit, or they can add an edit of their own
(which could be a revert or a "fix" of problem edits).

In either case, the latest edit is presumed good quality (because they are
doing it) and it becomes "accepted".

The misunderstanding, as I understand it, is that pending changes doesn't
care about any intervening edits or unchecked page history. If there had
been 1000 edits since the last accepted revision, or 30 but all vandalism,
none of that matters. The aim of the tool is to ensure the public (ie
/latest/) version is presentable. It doesn't care for or censor historic
revisions. Once a revision is no longer current, then whether it was
accepted, reverted, unchecked or the like in the past is immaterial. The
vandalism and good edits remain in the page history as normal, users can see
them, revert them, sort out complex mixes of vandalism/non-vandalism as much
as they like. Past "good" edits are no more "lost" than they ever were.  The
purpose of pending changes is to ensure the current presented version will
be presentable to non-editors and logged-out users - nothing more.

FT2

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 4:30 AM, Gregory Maxwell  wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Gregory Maxwell 
> wrote:
> > Imagine an article with many revisions and pending changes enabled:
> > A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
> [snip]
> > I don't know how to fix this. We could remove the reject button to
> > make it more clear that you use the normal editing functions (with
> > their full power) to reject.  But I must admit that the easy rollback
> > button is handy there.   Alternatively we could put a small chunk of
> > the edit history on the review page, showing the individual edits
> > which comprise the span-diff (bonus points for color-coding if someone
> > wants to make a real programming project out of it) along with the
> > undo links and such.
> [snip]
>
>
> Further discussion with Risker has caused me to realize that there is
> another significant problem situation with the reject button.
>
> Consider the following edit sequence:
>
> A, B, C, D, E
>
>
> A is a previously approved version.  B, and D are all excellent edits.
>  C and E are obvious vandalism.  E even managed to undo all the good
> changes of B,D while adding the vandalism.
>
> A reviewer hits the pending revisions link in order to review, they
> get the span diff from A to E.  All they see is vandalism, there is no
> indication of the redeeming edits in the intervening span.  So they
> hit reject.  The good edits are lost.
>
>
> Unlike the prior problem, the only way to solve this would be only
> display the REJECT button if all of the pending changes are by the
> same author (or limiting it to only one pending change in the span,
> which would be slightly more conservative but considering the
> behaviour of the rollback button I think the group-by-author behaviour
> would be fine).   The accept button is still safe.
>
> ___
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> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Problem with the pending changes review screen.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Gregory Maxwell  wrote:
> Imagine an article with many revisions and pending changes enabled:
> A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
[snip]
> I don't know how to fix this. We could remove the reject button to
> make it more clear that you use the normal editing functions (with
> their full power) to reject.  But I must admit that the easy rollback
> button is handy there.   Alternatively we could put a small chunk of
> the edit history on the review page, showing the individual edits
> which comprise the span-diff (bonus points for color-coding if someone
> wants to make a real programming project out of it) along with the
> undo links and such.
[snip]


Further discussion with Risker has caused me to realize that there is
another significant problem situation with the reject button.

Consider the following edit sequence:

A, B, C, D, E


A is a previously approved version.  B, and D are all excellent edits.
 C and E are obvious vandalism.  E even managed to undo all the good
changes of B,D while adding the vandalism.

A reviewer hits the pending revisions link in order to review, they
get the span diff from A to E.  All they see is vandalism, there is no
indication of the redeeming edits in the intervening span.  So they
hit reject.  The good edits are lost.


Unlike the prior problem, the only way to solve this would be only
display the REJECT button if all of the pending changes are by the
same author (or limiting it to only one pending change in the span,
which would be slightly more conservative but considering the
behaviour of the rollback button I think the group-by-author behaviour
would be fine).   The accept button is still safe.

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[WikiEN-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 
To: announc...@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 

[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


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[WikiEN-l] Problem with the pending changes review screen.

[Gregory Maxwell]

Imagine an article with many revisions and pending changes enabled:
A, B, C, D, E, F, G...

A is an approved edit. B,C,D,E,F,G are all pending edits.

B is horrible vandalism that the subsequent edits did not fix.

You are a reviewer, you go to review page by clicking a pending review
link.  On the review page you can accept— thus putting the horrible
vandalism on the site. Or you can "reject" which throws out the all
the good edits of C,D,E,F,G by reverting it to A.

To quote someone from IRC: "this seems like its going to make vandals
even more effective because all they have to do is make one edit in a
string of ten good ones, and then the entire set has to be thrown out"

But that isn't true at all.   You're not confined to the review page,
you simply go to the edit history, click undo on B, and then approve
your own edit (it won't be auto-approved because G wasn't approved).
Tada.

This completely non-obvious to people, because the only options on the
review page are accept or reject, and it's already causing confusion.
  This is a direct result of the late in the process addition of the
review button, — trying to fit the round-peg of a revision reviewing
system (which we can't have because of the fundamental incompatibility
with single linear editing history) in to presentation-flagging system
square hole that we actually have.

I don't know how to fix this. We could remove the reject button to
make it more clear that you use the normal editing functions (with
their full power) to reject.  But I must admit that the easy rollback
button is handy there.   Alternatively we could put a small chunk of
the edit history on the review page, showing the individual edits
which comprise the span-diff (bonus points for color-coding if someone
wants to make a real programming project out of it) along with the
undo links and such.

In the meantime I expect enwp will edit the message text to direct
people to the history page for more sophisticated editing activities.


(Thanks to Risker for pointing out how surprising the pending review
page was for this activity)

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[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia

[William Pietri]

I thought these lists were subscribed to the announcements list, but 
apparently not. Apologies if a duplicate turns up later.



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[WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: looking good for tonight

[William Pietri]

Just wanted to give everybody a quick update on Pending Changes. 
Basically, it looks like we're in good shape for going live on the 
English Wikipedia shortly.

We rolled the new code yesterday afternoon Pacific time. We've had a few 
hiccups, but everything seems well in hand. The biggest issue wasn't 
discovered until the wee hourss of the morning; the new code fought with 
a configuration issue on the Hebrew Wikisource, apparently breaking the 
wiki. (Sorry for that!) Domas Mituzas fixed the config and had 
everything back up within a few hours of the initial report. Other than 
that, there have been some small issues fixed promptly by Aaron, Chad, 
Ariel, Tomasz, and Tim.

There has also been some lively feedback on some interface changes 
designed to make unreviewed edits more obvious. Some projects would 
rather that they not be quite so attention-getting, and so have used 
local CSS changes to quiet them down a bit. That's not a showstopper, 
but we'll definitely be taking a look at that issue soon.


The next step will be to enable Pending Changes on the English 
Wikipedia. That will take place in an hour or two. We expect that to go 
more smoothly. No new code will go out; we're just turning on the 
extension used elsewhere, with a config that has been tested for the 
last 10 weeks on a labs site. Once everything is working and stable, 
we'll let everybody know.

After that, we expect to release updates weekly to the English 
Wikipedia. We have some interface improvements already in the queue, but 
will be listening carefully. to the community for feedback.

William

P.S. We'll be doing a retrospective afterward to see what lessons we can 
learn from this, so if you have feedback, please send me an off-list 
email and I'll make sure it gets incorporated.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Risker  wrote:
> Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough
> encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing
> protection.
[snip]

I couldn't disagree more strongly.  If we were making a judgement on
the basis of count of good edits to vandalism edits we would conclude
that the best solution would be to protect everything— with the
paradoxical effect of Wikipedia not existing at all.

The reality is that the goodness of a good edit is so good relative to
the baddness of a bad edit, mostly because of the tools and resources
that we have to deal with bad edits, that we can pretty much disregard
the vandalism side of that particular equation entirely.
Undo/rollback are easy buttons, and we have many contributors who do
nothing but remove obviously bad stuff (and some who, honestly, aren't
qualified to do much else!).   Without this truth Wikipedia simply
couldn't work.


The notion that the basic workload of dealing with simple vandalism
(as opposed, say, the timeliness of the corrections or the quality of
the articles in the interim) is a significant problem is unsupported
by any objective measurement which I've seen, I'd love to see pointers
suggesting otherwise. I've always believed that we use protection as a
short term measure to preserve the quality of the articles displayed
to readers (who are indifferent to our internal process) and the
protection policy on Enwp is quite explicit that the purpose of
protection is not pre-emptive ([[WP:NO-PREEMPT]]).

I think it's characteristic of an 'administrative bias' to assume that
protection is intended to be a workload reducer, if you're constantly
dealing with the problem cases you're going to overestimate their
magnitude.

This concern also neglects the reduction in the incentive to vandalize
that pending revisions ought to create.  Whatever portion of the
incentive to make trouble is related to the high visibility of the
trouble should be reduced.

Of course, we now have many troublemakers who don't care about
visibility at all— they make trouble purely to irritate Wikipedians.
But these WillyOnWheels class trouble makers are perfectly happy to
make their trouble on less prominent pages which have never enjoyed
persistent protection, since even obscure pages are fine for the
purpose of irritating Wikipedians.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Michael Peel]

On 15 Jun 2010, at 19:15, Risker wrote:

> On 15 June 2010 04:54, Michael Peel  wrote:
>> From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want
>> are examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult
>> question to answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b)
>> even if it has, the community can change its mind at any time. ;-)

Taking a couple of pieces of Risker's reply shamelessly out of order...

> The current planned queue for implementation can be found here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue
> 
> There are plenty of good sound bites in just the first couple of days (World
> War I and II, Ronald McDonald, Winston Churchill, Rush Limbaugh) that would
> have made do quite nicely.

Is this the official (i.e. community-approved) list? I wasn't aware that there 
was a queue at all, although it's very sensible for there to be one so that the 
outcome can be analysed properly. It would have certainly been useful to have 
shared this more widely...

> The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press

I certainly wasn't intending to imply that it was - I made it very clear at the 
start of my paragraph that I was coming from a specific point of view.

With pending changes, the press were going to cover this regardless - what 
we've* been trying to do is get the correct information out so that the media 
coverage is as accurate as possible. That is, for a given value of correct - 
it's difficult to be 100% accurate when things keep changing, or we discover 
new bits and pieces of information. ;-)

* we, in this context, meaning those who are at the end of Wikipedia press 
contact numbers.

I'm as eager as anyone to see how well pending changes works, purely on a 
quantitative basis, regardless of external coverage. I'm also eager to see how 
well it works on the entire spectrum of articles - those that will attract a 
lot of vandalism continuously, those that see bits and pieces at critical 
times, and those that have a mix of vandalism and constructive edits.

Mike
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Risker]

On 15 June 2010 14:54, Andrew Gray  wrote:

> On 15 June 2010 19:52, Gregory Maxwell  wrote:
>
> > Though I wouldn't recommend trying it _first_ nor would I recommend
> > trying it while the press is talking about.  Perhaps it would be an
> > intolerable train wreak only because the press is spreading the name
> > of that article around.  It would be unfortunate if we reached
> > incorrect conclusions on the effectiveness of pending vs protected on
> > high traffic articles simply due to some temporary attention skew.
>
> Mmm. If we've got a queue - an idea which I have to say I quite like,
> even if I was initially a bit confused by it - then why not schedule
> in some articles that we expect it not to work very well on? It could
> be it has unexpectedly less terrible effects.
>
>
>
Well, part of the objective here is to see whether we get enough
encyclopedia-worthy edits to determine if it is worthwhile removing
protection. Myself, I'd generally be happy if we saw a 1:10 useful edit to
vandalism ratio on most articles, but most articles aren't going to get that
many edits anyway.  There are some high-viewership articles in the early
going, so we'll see pretty quickly how much of a difference the pending
changes level makes. However, that same ratio isn't particularly workable if
we're talking about an article that starts getting 50 or more edits a day,
especially when the article involved is a {{good}} or {{featured}} article;
remember that even 5 vandalism hits a day is almost invariably sufficient to
semi-protect an article, not just because of the visible vandalism, but also
because it is a huge waste of volunteer time, and it also impedes the
continued improvement and maintenance of articles.

Unfortunately, we don't have a way of keeping track of the number of pending
changes that are (a) rejected as vandalism/BLP problem, (b) accepted
directly into the article or (c) some other variation, such as putting the
proposed edit onto the article talk page for discussion.  I am hoping that
we might be able to track how many pending edits are made by anonymous/newly
registered editors versus autoconfirmed editors, though, and what percentage
of edits by autoconfirmed editors winds up being held because of an earlier
pending revision.

We really do need some hard numbers here, so that the community can make
informed decisions about the results of this trial.

Risker/Anne




I
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Andrew Gray]

On 15 June 2010 19:52, Gregory Maxwell  wrote:

> Though I wouldn't recommend trying it _first_ nor would I recommend
> trying it while the press is talking about.  Perhaps it would be an
> intolerable train wreak only because the press is spreading the name
> of that article around.  It would be unfortunate if we reached
> incorrect conclusions on the effectiveness of pending vs protected on
> high traffic articles simply due to some temporary attention skew.

Mmm. If we've got a queue - an idea which I have to say I quite like,
even if I was initially a bit confused by it - then why not schedule
in some articles that we expect it not to work very well on? It could
be it has unexpectedly less terrible effects.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> On 15 June 2010 19:15, Risker  wrote:
>> The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press, it's to persuade
>> the community that this is a useful and viable tool.
>
> I couldn't disagree more. The objective of this trial is to see if the
> feature is effective. This is a trial, not a marketing campaign. We
> shouldn't be skewing the parameters of the trial to get the result we
> want.

On this point I have to agree. Lets not _speculate_ that GWB would be
a train-wreak. Lets try it, and see if we learn anything from the
experience.   If we already had all the answers we wouldn't have any
problems. ;)


Though I wouldn't recommend trying it _first_ nor would I recommend
trying it while the press is talking about.  Perhaps it would be an
intolerable train wreak only because the press is spreading the name
of that article around.  It would be unfortunate if we reached
incorrect conclusions on the effectiveness of pending vs protected on
high traffic articles simply due to some temporary attention skew.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Thomas Dalton]

On 15 June 2010 19:15, Risker  wrote:
> I'm actually becoming increasingly concerned that the notion that the
> [[George W. Bush]] article would be unlocked has to be coming from somewhere
> within the organization, since it's being repeated in every single article
> in the press.  This is not a good sign.

I believe I was the person that suggested the Bush article as an
example when the BBC asked for one. I don't know where the articles
that were published before the BBC article got the example from. I'm
sorry if I was mistaken, but my understand is that this feature is
intended precisely for articles like the Bush one.

> The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press, it's to persuade
> the community that this is a useful and viable tool.

I couldn't disagree more. The objective of this trial is to see if the
feature is effective. This is a trial, not a marketing campaign. We
shouldn't be skewing the parameters of the trial to get the result we
want.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Risker]

On 15 June 2010 04:54, Michael Peel  wrote:

>
> On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:39, Risker wrote:
>
> > On 14 June 2010 19:22, David Gerard  wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.php
> >>
> >> Spotted by Nihiltres.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > 
> > The George Bush page is not going to be part of this trial, because there
> is
> > no reasonable chance that the tiny, tiny percentage of useful edits will
> > make up for all the vandalism and BLP violations that will be added. That
> > was possibly the one thing that everyone working on the encyclopedia end
> of
> > the trial came to agreement on very quickly.
>
> Interesting - really? I was really hoping to see this tried to see whether
> it could work on such an article. Can you link me to the discussion about
> this, please?
>
> From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want
> are examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult
> question to answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b)
> even if it has, the community can change its mind at any time. ;-)
>

I'm actually becoming increasingly concerned that the notion that the
[[George W. Bush]] article would be unlocked has to be coming from somewhere
within the organization, since it's being repeated in every single article
in the press.  This is not a good sign.

The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press, it's to persuade
the community that this is a useful and viable tool.  Sticking it onto an
article that will probably get more vandalism in an hour than all the rest
of the pending changes articles put together will get in a week is hardly
the way to persuade the community that it's a good investment of volunteer
time and energy.  This extension isn't being sold to the world at large,
it's being sold to the community that will have to work with it.

The current planned queue for implementation can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue

There are plenty of good sound bites in just the first couple of days (World
War I and II, Ronald McDonald, Winston Churchill, Rush Limbaugh) that would
have made do quite nicely.

Risker/Anne
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Thomas Dalton]

On 15 June 2010 11:51, Andrew Gray  wrote:
> On 15 June 2010 09:54, Michael Peel  wrote:
>
>> From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want 
>> are examples
>> where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult question to answer 
>> when a) the
>> community hasn't made its mind up, and b) even if it has, the community can 
>> change
>> its mind at any time. ;-)
>
> Someone proposed the daily FAs, which I think are an excellent idea
> from an exposure perspective, but I don't know whether that got the
> nod or not.

We don't currently protect FAs, do we? I thought we kept them
unprotected and dealt with the inevitable vandalism, as a matter of
principle (we're the encyclopaedia anyone can edit, so our most
prominent article should be editable). I think the consensus is that
pending changes should only be used (at least during the trial) on
articles that would otherwise be protected.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[MuZemike]

 From NetworkWorld.com, which I'm not sure they're painting a more 
positive or more negative picutre of pending changes:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/62518

-MuZemike

On 6/14/2010 8:46 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 15/06/2010, MuZemike  wrote:
>
>> Have there been any other media outlets, blogs, etc. who see Pending
>> Changes as a "loosening of controls"? I haven't; perhaps I've been
>> hanging around with the community too much who say it will be more
>> restrictive than before :)
>>  
> To be perfectly honest, I don't think anyone knows, it will probably
> depend on what policies are built around it.
>
>
>> -MuZemike
>>  
>


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[WikiEN-l] Feature Article Prizes - British Museum

[Liam Wyatt]

Dear en.wiki-l,

As some of you may have seen in this week's Wikipedia Signpost[1] or on the
Wikimedia UK Blog[2] the British Museum is offering five prizes of £100
(≈$140USD/€120) at their shop/bookshop[3]  for new Featured Articles on
topics related to the British Museum *in any Wikipedia language edition*.
Ideally, the topics will be articles about collection items. Your choice. A
good place to start looking is Category: Collection of the British Museum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Collection_of_the_British_Museum

The full information about this "Features Article Prize" is at the
documentation page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Featured_Article_prize   That
is [[WP:GLAM/BM/Featured Article prize]]

This is the first time an organisation in the UK has put out a prize that
recognises the value of good quality articles on Wikipedia in their own
right. This is a recognition that Wikipedia work is not only good quality
but is consistent with the outreach aspect of the Museum’s mission to engage
the public. You don’t have to sign-up and the competition runs as long as
there are prizes to hand out.


The museum has curators dedicated to answering phone and email questions
about their specialist areas and they recognise that editing Wikipedia
articles, especially about items in the BM’s collections, counts for those
purposes. Equally, the museum will not attempt exert any editorial control
over the articles and accepts the community’s own judgement on what
constitutes a Featured Article. If you require assistance in approaching the
British Museum curators, please contact me directly or place your request at
the "British Museum: One on One collaborations" page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/One_on_one_collaborations



Again, the full and place to ask questions is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Featured_Article_prize



Good luck!

Liam Wyatt [[Witty Lama]]
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata

[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Tools/Single#News_and_notes
[2]
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2010/06/featured-article-prizes-from-the-british-museum/

[3] http://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[Cenarium sysop]

> Can you please identify methods in which we can measure the improvement
> here?  Are you proposing, even before the trial starts, to start including
> articles that do not meet the criteria for page protection?  Let's be
> clear,
> Cenarium; the trial is very specifically only to be used on pages that meet
> the *current* criteria for page protection; what you're suggesting here is
> something completely unrelated to the trial of pending changes in and of
> itself.
>

You know well that there are no objective way to say if an article meets the
'criteria' or not. If you ask different admins about a particular situation,
some will say no protection is warranted, some will say temporary
semi-protection is, of variable length, and some say that indefinite
semi-protection is. The protection policy says 'heavy and persistent
vandalism or violations of content policy' for indefinite, and 'Subject to
significant but temporary vandalism or disruption' for temporary, this
allows for considerable discretion. And since pending changes protection is
much less restrictive than semi-protection, admins will naturally lower
their personal threshold for applying it. There are several admins who apply
a threshold considerably lower than average, their semi-protections are
often contested but almost always uphold, or with no admin going ahead to
remove them. When several admins started to make use of ' liberal semi' for
BLPs, there has been considerable objection (by me among others) but almost
all protections stayed.

There we see the two contradictory needs, to better protect articles, BLPs
in particular, versus to keep articles editable. Excessive protection (of
any kind) is bad; but BLPs subject to vandalism or BLP violations to a level
where semi-protection would be within discretion, but just below the
threshold where most admins would protect, is not satisfactory.

By its flexibility, pending changes allows to better balance those two
contradictory needs.

A great advantage of pending changes protection is that we can see edits, so
determine to a certain extent if protection is still warranted. With
semi-protection we can only guess. So we'll be in better measure to remove
pending changes protection were no longer needed.

This means we'll simultaneously be able to handle more cases for protection,
and remove protection where no longer needed. The total of protection may
not even grow sensibly at all, but protection would be better distributed.
We just need to keep an eye on the backlog and adjust if necessary. In the
trial we may not readily see this happening, because it would be more
limited and controlled, but I'm sure it will occur to a certain extent.

This won't handle all issues, especially isolated vandalism and BLP
violations, where protection cannot be used per policy, which is why we
vitally need better monitoring tools, like patrolled revisions. I would
strongly oppose any attempt to no longer regard the protection policy for
using pending changes, or alter the protection policy to extend its scope.

For discussion of methods, see Wikipedia talk:Pending changes/Trial.

This is a very dangerous view on the issue. This is what people
> who strenously opposed the new mechanism were most afraid
> of, and the supporters originally said would not be a danger.
> If this really happened, I could easily see many of the people
> originally in support of the new mechanism, could do a full
> volte-face and come strongly in opposition of the mechanism.
>
> Supporters of the original agreement often voiced the proviso
> that using the mechanism for semied/BLP's or whatever their
> personal threshold was, would never ever be a thin end of the
> wedge to spread things out to things we wouldn't semi currently.
> That is the *old* *agreement* on this issue. A huge drive by any
> tiny group of blow-hard editors to expand use of the mechanism
> beyond what we currently semi, could back-fire spectacularly.
>
> I don't dispute that in the fullness of time; years or decades
> from now, it might eventually go that route, but that is a
> completely different issue, and I suspect there would be
> many more important community supported initiatives that
> would have to be accepted in the interim, before that could
> remotely be acceptable.



People were mostly afraid to see this becoming a FlaggedRevs implementation
similar or close to that on de.wikipedia, which is very different from what
I imagine.

The idea of Yamamoto
Ichiroto use
flaggedrevs as an alternative to protection was a breakthrough
because it allows not only more editability than classic protection but also
to better control uses of protection, as I explain above, this allows a much
finer distribution, to apply it where it is needed, and only where it is
needed, more than classic protection would ever allow.

Pending changes is now heavily associated with protection, even on the
technical side. The protection poli

Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[Ian Woollard]

On 15/06/2010, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen  wrote:
>> *Pending changes will help with disputes.
>> No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in
>> the
>> trial policy (scope section), that pending changes protection, level 1 or
>> 2,
>> should not be used on pages subject to disputes.
>
> I agree with your point here. The mechanism shouldn't be used
> as a damper in edit wars. That way, madness lies. You could have
> hundreds of reverts back and forth never going live, and a Stygian
> Stable for the person sorting out through all that which revisions
> and edits to go live finally. Just a total Charlie Foxtrot in other words.

Nah. It's not usually going to be anything like that bad, and worse
case you can always revert the whole lot and make the editors do them
again. I've done that before with articles.

It's also useful because in those situations people can do 'what if I
do this?' kind of edits, and people can go 'don't like that' and
revert it back, or make further edits/suggestions without the concerns
of messing up the users view of the article. It can act to *defuse*
arguments.

So I think that's over-restricting things.

And that's the problem. People think they know what this feature is,
and what it's for, but it's only when the community plays with it,
that we'll really know. So it's a big concern that there's lots of
weird and unnecessary restrictions on what is only a small test. I
mean, what's the worse that can happen?

> Yours,
>
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

-- 
-Ian Woollard

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 6:59 PM, David Goodman  wrote:
> There has never been agreement for more than the 2,000. It will be

Wha?

The 2000 limit was a technical thing which came later, and not from
the community.

I don't think it's a bad thing, even outside of the simple performance
concerns that inspired it — otherwise we probably could expect some
trigger happy person to mass convert all (semi-)protected pages before
we've had a chance to work the kinks out of the software...

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Andrew Gray]

On 15 June 2010 09:54, Michael Peel  wrote:

> From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want 
> are examples
> where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult question to answer 
> when a) the
> community hasn't made its mind up, and b) even if it has, the community can 
> change
> its mind at any time. ;-)

Someone proposed the daily FAs, which I think are an excellent idea
from an exposure perspective, but I don't know whether that got the
nod or not.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[Chad]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 2:01 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
 wrote:
> William Pietri wrote:
>> At the end, if there is no decision to extend
>> the trial or to permanently adopt Pending Changes, the community will
>> probably need to go and switch all Pending Changes articles to something
>> else. (Unless they'd like us just to switch them en masse to, say,
>> semi-protection, but that seems a bit crude.)
>>
>>
>>
>
> You say crude, I say simple. If there are articles there
> needing full protection, nature will take its course,
> and they will end there in due time.
>

Just as a minor technical note: a maintenance script exists
to turn all articles protected with Pending Changes into normal
semi-protections.

So if we do reach that juncture and that is what the community
wants to do, it would be a trivial action.

-Chad

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[WikiEN-l] Wiki(p|m)edia page display on iPad

[Magnus Manske]

Hi all,

since there's already several million iPad (and soon, other tablet)
users out there, I thought I'd try one in the Apple store to see what
Wikipedia looks/feels like. Generally, I think it's very nice, with
one exception. In "portrait" mode, the sidebar takes up a lot of real
estate. Especially when you scroll down a long page, there's this
annoying white bar on the left that serves no real purpose. Also,
IMHO, it destroys that "book feeling" that would fit so well with the
iPad.

So I wrote a quick JS hack that /should/ hide the sidebar on the iPad.
Instead, it shows an icon in the top left corner that, when
"finger-clicked", will show the sidebar again, in case you really want
it.

Demo (on Commons, because of the "withJS" option there):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4iPad.js

Now, that should /only/ work on the iPad. Could someone please confirm
this and tell me if it's an improvement. On image pages it probably
doesn't matter a lot, but more text-laden pages like
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Welcome?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4iPad.js
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4iPad.js
it should make a visible difference.

If it is as good as I suspect, we could use it by default on the
Wikipedias etc. There's lots of room for improvement; maybe the
sidebar could appear when switching to landscape mode (as in the mail
app). The usability experts may want to take a look :-)

Cheers,
Magnus

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Michael Peel]

On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:39, Risker wrote:

> On 14 June 2010 19:22, David Gerard  wrote:
> 
>> 
>> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.php
>> 
>> Spotted by Nihiltres.
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> The George Bush page is not going to be part of this trial, because there is
> no reasonable chance that the tiny, tiny percentage of useful edits will
> make up for all the vandalism and BLP violations that will be added. That
> was possibly the one thing that everyone working on the encyclopedia end of
> the trial came to agreement on very quickly.

Interesting - really? I was really hoping to see this tried to see whether it 
could work on such an article. Can you link me to the discussion about this, 
please?

>From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want are 
>examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult question to 
>answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b) even if it has, 
>the community can change its mind at any time. ;-)

Thanks,
Mike


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pending Changes: first press

[Michael Peel]

BBC News have just run their story on this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10312095.stm

Mike

On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:22, David Gerard wrote:

> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_loosen_controls_tonight.php
> 
> Spotted by Nihiltres.
> 
> 
> - d.
> 
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[Risker]

On 15 June 2010 02:38, Cenarium sysop  wrote:

> To Risker:
>
> *Edits by reviewers to articles with pending changes are automatically
> accepted.
> NO, the reviewer has to manually accept the new revision, and you could
> have
> asked **before** creating this mountain of drama and FUD on enwiki, or
> tested the configuration yourself, or read the documentation, as this is
> stated very clearly in the tables at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes.
>


Actually, it was impossible to try on the testwiki at the time, because the
"reviewer" permission hadn't been activated yet.

And the tables clearly state that the edit must be "accepted". There was no
indication at the time in the documentation that any other option was
possible or acceptable, and no way to test it at the reviewer level.


>
> *Pending changes will help to reduce visibility of vandalism and BLP
> violations
> Yes, classic protection is way too rigid for Wikipedia today, and has
> always
> been too rigid. The flexibility of pending changes protection will allow to
> use protection where needed, and only where needed, more than classic
> protection would have ever allowed on its own. The protection policy allows
> for a considerable amount of discretion, and it is evident that
> administrators in general would be more willing to apply pending changes
> protection on articles subject to vandalism or BLP violations than they
> would otherwise have been with the rigid semi-protection. As long as we can
> keep up with the backlog, this is a win-win situation.
>


Can you please identify methods in which we can measure the improvement
here?  Are you proposing, even before the trial starts, to start including
articles that do not meet the criteria for page protection?  Let's be clear,
Cenarium; the trial is very specifically only to be used on pages that meet
the *current* criteria for page protection; what you're suggesting here is
something completely unrelated to the trial of pending changes in and of
itself.



>
> *Pending changes will encourage more non-editors to try to edit, and these
> new editors will become part of our community.
> Yes, and no. We may not gain considerably more editors, because it would
> concern a small number of articles, but every edit makes an editor, even if
> one-time. No to the second part, because every editor *is* a member of the
> community. The community is not only the most active editors. And yes,
> there
> are people trying to edit semi-protected pages, and in a constructive way.
> Since we modified the
> Protectedpagetext >to
> make submitting edit requests more accessible, we've received many
> more,
> the vast majority of those are in good-faith, so there are definitely
> people
> out there trying to edit.
>

Those who are making good faith edits (or requesting them) *might* be
members of the community, but I'm not particularly inclined to include the
drive-by vandals as such.



>
> *Pending changes will help with disputes.
> No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in
> the
> trial policy (scope section), that pending changes protection, level 1 or
> 2,
> should not be used on pages subject to disputes.
>

Remember, my list was made up of things that various people have proposed as
good reasons to institute pending changes. I completely agree with you that
it was never intended, but some people still think it was. I removed it from
the draft policy, in fact; I have no idea who added it in.


>
> *Anonymous editors will now be able to edit the [[George W. Bush]]  and
> [[Barack Obama]] articles.
> No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in
> the
> trial policy (scope section), that pages subject to too high levels of
> vandalism should not be protected with pending changes but classic
> protection.
>

Yes, indeed. Another place where we agree!  Unfortunately, the very first
press publication about this change specifically suggested that the [[George
W. Bush]] article would become accessible to unregistered and newly
registered editors.

I'm not the enemy here. I have something of a well-earned reputation as a
BLP absolutist and I spend a good part of every week addressing the fallout
of vandalism. But I've been around this project too long, and seen too many
exceedingly buggy software deployments and major attempts to hijack policy
and practice. I can turn a blind eye to a fair number of these, if they
don't affect matters within my usual area of assumed responsibility. This
one, however, is openly being billed as one thing (improved editing
accessibilty for non-registered and newly registered users on articles
they've previously been shut out of), but it's pretty obvious that there is
a significant desire to use this tool to do exactly the opposite, and
actually restrict automatically visible edits from non-registered and newly
registered users on a much larger swath

Re: [WikiEN-l] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Cenarium sysop wrote:
> To Risker:
>
>
> *Pending changes will help to reduce visibility of vandalism and BLP
> violations
> Yes, classic protection is way too rigid for Wikipedia today, and has always
> been too rigid. The flexibility of pending changes protection will allow to
> use protection where needed, and only where needed, more than classic
> protection would have ever allowed on its own. The protection policy allows
> for a considerable amount of discretion, and it is evident that
> administrators in general would be more willing to apply pending changes
> protection on articles subject to vandalism or BLP violations than they
> would otherwise have been with the rigid semi-protection. As long as we can
> keep up with the backlog, this is a win-win situation.
>   
This is a very dangerous view on the issue. This is what people
who strenously opposed the new mechanism were most afraid
of, and the supporters originally said would not be a danger.
If this really happened, I could easily see many of the people
originally in support of the new mechanism, could do a full
volte-face and come strongly in opposition of the mechanism.

Supporters of the original agreement often voiced the proviso
that using the mechanism for semied/BLP's or whatever their
personal threshold was, would never ever be a thin end of the
wedge to spread things out to things we wouldn't semi currently.
That is the *old* *agreement* on this issue. A huge drive by any
tiny group of blow-hard editors to expand use of the mechanism
beyond what we currently semi, could back-fire spectacularly.

I don't dispute that in the fullness of time; years or decades
from now, it might eventually go that route, but that is a
completely different issue, and I suspect there would be
many more important community supported initiatives that
would have to be accepted in the interim, before that could
remotely be acceptable.


>
> *Pending changes will help with disputes.
> No, and it was clearly stated in the proposal, and now clearly stated in the
> trial policy (scope section), that pending changes protection, level 1 or 2,
> should not be used on pages subject to disputes.
>
>   

I agree with your point here. The mechanism shouldn't be used
as a damper in edit wars. That way, madness lies. You could have
hundreds of reverts back and forth never going live, and a Stygian
Stable for the person sorting out through all that which revisions
and edits to go live finally. Just a total Charlie Foxtrot in other words.



Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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