Pending Changes enwiki trial/Roadmap

This is the release planning page for the Pending Changes feature. Please direct comments to the discussion page.

The page has three sections:

• Current Situation – an explanation of the current situation and larger strategy
• November 2010 Release – a minor update to Pending Changes that addresses some of the known issues with the software
• Future Releases – an overview of the long-term planning for Pending Changes

For more background information on the Pending Changes feature and rollout, visit Wikipedia:Pending_changes and read Jimbo weighs in on the Pending changes poll.

Current Situation

The Wikimedia Foundation continues to support the development of "Pending Changes", a feature that is currently only used in the English Wikipedia. Pending Changes is an important experiment in a) supporting improved patrolling of selected pages, b) providing a more open alternative to semi-protection for reducing reader-visible vandalism on high risk pages.

As part of the trial, Pending Changes is currently only used on a relatively small number of pages in the English Wikipedia. Open questions remain as to under what circumstances the existing Pending Changes system, or improved versions thereof, provides an overall net benefit relative to other page protection levels (no page protection, semi-protection, full protection). We've attempted to support the Wikipedia community in obtaining and analyzing metrics (see w:Wikipedia:Pending changes/Metrics ) which would help with this analysis.

A recent poll suggests that approximately a two-thirds majority of participants on the English Wikipedia is in favor of continued use of Pending Changes in some form. As per Jimmy Wales' proposed course of action, we want to support the Wikipedia community in continued experimental use of this feature over the coming 6 months. To do so, we will allocate an appropriate level of resources to support the ongoing development of this feature. This page reflects our current release planning.

The Wikimedia Foundation operates with a small staff, and in the same timeframe of this development, we also have several other major development and operations initiatives underway, all of which are on clearly defined timelines, in some cases with related contractual obligations. You can read more about our ongoing engineering projects in our September engineering update as well as our draft October update

We appreciate all help, with Pending Changes and other projects, as well as general patience and support if timelines slip. If you'd like to help with the coding effort for Pending Changes, or just with the functional requirements analysis, leave a note on the discussion page and let us know.

Finally, from our point of view, the resource investment in Pending Changes must be justified by its use and impact. At this point, we view Pending Changes as a still-experimental feature, and we'll support reaching a firm conclusion on its scope of use and ideal use scenarios. If, for example, it becomes used on every single biography in Wikipedia, this would justify an increased resource investment. If, on the other hand, the community doesn't support its continued use, we will dramatically scale down our resource investment.

With that said, the below timeline reflects our planning under the assumption of cautious continued use as the English Wikipedia community continues to explore the value and impact of this feature.

November 2010 Release

This is a minor release that addresses some of the known issues with Pending Changes. It focuses on quick-to-implement features and fixes that had the most obvious and immediate benefits. We currently plan to roll this work out to en.wikipedia.org on November 16, 2010.

The major focuses of the release are:

• Performance improvements, including:
  • Faster display of old revisions on diff pages (Bugzilla:25289). We feel this is really important to fix, but it is the most uncertain part of the schedule. We have brainstormed a few different strategies, but this is still partly a research task rather than straight execution.
  • Remove delay upon pressing "accept" - we believe this problem is addressed in our development version of the software
• Fix easy/obvious usability problems, including:
  • Giving the Pending Changes special pages more intuitive names (Bugzilla:25300). The changes we are considering are:
    • w:Special:AdvancedReviewLog -> PendingChangesReviewLog
    • w:Special:ValidationStatistics -> PendingChangesStatistics
    • w:Special:StablePages -> PendingChangesPages
    • w:Special:OldReviewedPages -> PendingChangesForReview
    • w:Special:ProblemChanges -> PendingChangesTagged
  • Reduce confusion around the accept and unaccept interface. The unaccept button should be hidden when inactive (instead of greyed out.)
    • See w:Wikipedia:Pending changes/Feedback#Unapprove button and w:Wikipedia:Pending changes/Feedback#Accept/Unaccept
    • Note: this is already in trunk. See the test wiki
  • Proper "reject" button (Bugzilla:25294) - a clearly labeled "Reject" button tied to the rollback or undo action on the review form. The feature should use the text entered in the summary as the reason for the rejection.
    • See w:Wikipedia:Pending changes/Feedback#Unapprove button and the current specification
• Incremental resolution of issues surrounding "review conflicts" (Bugzilla:25295)
  • If we can figure out some easy fixes. This is a hard problem to solve, though.
• Minor usability work based on community collaboration - items that we will do if time permits, subject to getting timely community design guidance. These changes could include:
  • History style cleanups (Bugzilla:25296)
    • Only very basic stuff, e.g. CSS fixes, wording and character changes
  • Making it clearer when someone is viewing a pending revision rather than the accepted version of a page (Bugzilla:25299)
  • Linking to Special:PendingChangesForReview (which was called SpecialOldReviewedPages) from sidebar (Bugzilla:25298)
• Bonus Features (Bugzilla:25301)
  • If the release is ahead of schedule, we'll incorporate other minor improvements as time allows. We'll work with the community to clarify some feature requests

Future Releases

While we're working on the November 2010 release, we'll also be fleshing out our longer range plan. We want to make sure that we treat Pending Changes as part of a larger suite of tools that helps us achieve the following goals:

• Vandalism prevention and more efficient patrolling
• Higher article quality
• Keeping Wikipedia editable by the largest possible audience

In order to do this, we want to develop a usability plan, which may involve conducting one or more usability studies. As part of figuring out our plan, we may figure out some short term fixes we can make, but the goal is to have a coherent and serious plan to address the usability of the feature and how it ties into our larger quality and openness goals.

Features under consideration

The community made dozens of feature requests for Pending Changes. When planning the November release, we chose quick-to-implement features and fixes that had the most obvious and immediate benefits.

We haven't forgotten the other requests. Some of the requests may be relatively simple, and we might be able to get to soon. Most of the others either required significant development, significant study, or may be of dubious impact or value. We've captured those requests as best as we could here: Pending Changes enwiki trial/Feature ideas.