The pending changes fiasco: how an attempt to answer one question turned into a quagmire
The following is an op-ed by Beeblebrox, an established editor, administrator, and oversighter on the English Wikipedia. He writes of his experiences with the trial of pending changes in 2010 and in assessing its results. Pending changes is a review system that prevents certain edits from being publicly visible until they are approved by another editor. The system temporarily used on the English Wikipedia was a modified form of the system in use on a number of other Wikimedia projects; nonetheless, because it altered the fundamental editing process in an attempt to stem abuses, it attracted both supporters and opponents in large numbers. For a full list of pages connected to the trial, see Template:Pending changes trial. The views expressed are those of the author only.
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7 June 2010
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I had good intentions, and they led me straight into Wikipedia Hell. As most of you know, pending changes (PC) was a modified version of the "flagged revision" system used on other Wikipedia projects. It was deployed here as a trial: the trial period expired and ... nothing happened. That's where I come in.
I had applied PC to a few dozen articles during and after the trial period. I got a message on my talk page from a user who noted that I was still using it even though the trial period was over. I didn't think I was doing anything drastic, but it was still bothering some folks because there was no clear mandate to continue using the tool. I'd participated in a number of policy discussions in the past, so I took it upon myself to seek an answer to the question of whether we wanted to retain this tool or not. Six months later, the question remains unanswered.