Wikipedia:Pending changes/Request for Comment February 2011: Difference between revisions

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== Final closure statementClosure ==

:''(first posted on the talk page [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Request_for_Comment_February_2011&diff=prev&oldid=427856936 here]; see Archive 5)''

A few preliminaries. First, I'd like to thank the editors who came to my talkpage and asked me to close this discussion, for their confidence. Second, I'd like to apologize for the fact that it's taken me a few more days to finish reviewing the input than I had hoped. Third, I've tried not to write this closing using too much [[Wikipedia:Bradspeak|Bradspeak]], but if I've failed, forgive me. Fourth, I'd like to ask that if I've posted this closing in the wrong place—e.g., if it should be in a nicely formatted box at the top of the project page or something like that—then could someone please copy it and put it there. (I don't think anyone wants me to delay this closure any longer while I figure that out.)

I'll begin by emphasizing the exact scope of this discussion. The proposal reads: ''The Pending Changes trial ended many months ago, but around 1000 articles are still using PC protection. It is proposed to remove pending changes protection from all articles, for now, with no prejudice against reinstating it in the future, in some form, based upon consensus and discussion.'' Thus, that's the only proposal I'm addressing here. The future of pending changes (or flagged revisions or anything else) on English Wikipedia is not being resolved today. And I'm not presenting my own views on PC/FR, partly because that would be off-topic and partly because I have mixed feelings about them.

I find that both supporters and opposers made many valid points throughout the discussion. The vast majority of the comments were reasonable and entitled to full respect in assessing the consensus. Unlike what we have unfortunately seen in many other contentious discussions on-wiki, I did not find many problems with frivolous views, SPAs, socking, or anything else that would warrant discounting any significant number of comments or !votes. (There was certainly some excessive rhetoric from a few commenters, and I hope that future PC/FR discussions can have less of that, but I saw nothing that significantly derailed the discussion.)

As closer, my task is to ascertain [[Wikipedia:consensus|consensus]], as this vague term is defined on Wikipedia. Clearly we do not have a consensus in the optimal sense of the discussion's converging on a result endorsed by more-or-less everyone. The policy page on consensus tells us that in such a case, "sometimes voluntary agreement of all interested editors proves impossible to achieve, and a majority decision must be taken. More than a simple numerical majority is generally required for major changes."

Here, the number of commenters supporting the proposal is 127, and the number opposing is 65. That's a bit over 66% in support of ending the pending-changes trial now, without prejudice to community decision-making about a further trial or implementation of PC in the future. A voting result of 66% is not as high as we require for some decision-making (for example, most of the time it wouldn't be sufficient to pass an RfA, although ironically it would have been enough in the last election to get elected an arbitrator)—but it's a two-to-one margin and can't be disregarded either. For purposes of governance decisions on the English Wikipedia, two-to-one is almost a landslide. The basic outcome of the RfC is clear and it is that the current pending-changes trial should come to an end.

The closure comes with two caveats, however. (I am sure that no one expected a closure by me to end without at least two caveats.) The first of these is that we can't just turn off the PC trial by flipping a switch ten minutes from now. Although some of the articles that are currently part of the PC trial were chosen basically at random or as controls, others were put on PC because of serious and persistent vandalism, especially BLP-related vandalism, or of even more serious BLP-related problems. Editors will need time to review the list of articles currently on PC to ensure that as needed, they are semiprotected, placed on more watchlists, etc. Accordingly, the PC trial will end, with the ''possible'' exception noted below, 14 days from today.

The second caveat is that there may remain a few articles for which removing PC status would really be grossly irresponsible—an example might be if the trial list includes a handful of extremely sensitive BLPs that have been the subject of persistent vandalism or harassment by sleeper socks (so that semi'ing would be insufficient). This does not reopen, for this discussion, suggestions that "all BLPs should be on PC" or even "all high-risk BLPs should be on PC"—those are respectable viewpoints, and might be outcomes of a future consensus, but for better or worse, they clearly are not what the community has decided now. Still, I can imagine there being some extreme situations where it could be considered outrageous to remove PC with nothing to replace it, and where semiprotecting would be insufficient (and full-protecting would be unreasonable). Relatively few of either the supporters' or the opposers' comments addressed this possibility.

Therefore, I think there is a need for further input on this question: ''Given that there is a numerical consensus to discontinue the current pending-changes trial, should any exceptions be made for articles with a history of extreme problems that cannot be solved by other means?'' The most useful responses to this question, I might add, will contain specifics rather than generalities. Given that this RfC has been open for too long already, I ask that editors try to post comments on this new question within 7 days from today. I will post an update to this close afterwards. At that time I will also try to post some suggestions for the next phase of discussions about the future of this entire endeavor.

The proposal itself indicates that adopting it would not affect PC test pages, test pages created in userspace by user request, or the like. Such pages should continue to exist, so that editors who are curious what PC is or who are asked to comment about its adoption in the future, can experiment and know what is being talked about. This exception to "turning off pending changes" is included in the close.

I hope that these comments and conclusions are helpful to the community, and I am sure I don't have to ask that editors should feel free to comment on them. [[User:Newyorkbrad|Newyorkbrad]] ([[User talk:Newyorkbrad|talk]]) 04:21, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

=== Additional comments from the closer ===

:''(first posted on the talk page [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Request_for_Comment_February_2011&diff=prev&oldid=430122034 here]; see Archive 5'')

First off, my sincere apologies for not having gotten these comments posted a few days ago as I had hoped. For various reasons that will not be of general interest, I have had limited wiki-time this week.

====Closure follow-up regarding the near term====

I have carefully reviewed the input on this page since my closing two weeks ago. My initial reaction is that I am concerned by the limited amount of input that has been received. It appears that the closing and my request for follow-up attention by administrators and for follow-up input on a specific, narrow question has, due to no fault of anyone in particular, received far too little attention using our internal publicity mechanisms. This situation should be corrected.

Despite this problem, it appears that administrators have been giving attention to articles that have been part of the pending changes (PC) trial, including deciding whether to use semiprotection in lieu of PC. However, there are still a couple of hundred articles under PC so this job obviously has not yet been fully completed. In light of the lack of publicity and the need for administrators to give careful attention to this task, I think it is best that we allow PC status on any articles within the PC trial that have not yet been carefully reviewed by an administrator, to remain in place for 7 additional days. In other words, the "deadline" for termination of the PC trial (except as otherwise specified), which had been today, is extended for 7 days. I acknowledge that in light of the 2-to-1 result of the RfC, even this limited extension may be near the limit of what can be considered consistent with consensus. Therefore, except as described below, I do not anticipate any further extensions.

In my closing, I specifically asked for comments on the following specific question: ''Given that there is a numerical consensus to discontinue the current pending-changes trial, should any exceptions be made for articles with a history of extreme problems that cannot be solved by other means?'' I thank the editors who have commented on this issue, although as noted I regret that there weren't more comments.

I understand the input I have received to the effect that it is desirable to draw a clear line separating the completed PC trial from any future implementation of PC, flagged revisions, or any similar system. Terminating the PC trial as to the vast majority of the articles that were under PC is consistent with the consensus. I remain seriously concerned, however, that for a small number of [[WP:BLP|biographies of living persons]], turning off PC without a reasonable substitute would be an irresponsible thing for the project to do.

Specifically, I refer to the subset of BLP articles in which there has been a serious problem of persistent vandalism, defamation, harassment of the article subject, or the like. Contrary to the views of some of our critics, I do not believe the number of such articles is a major fraction of our overall number of BLPs. But it is not a trivial problem either, by a long shot, and there have been instances of serious BLP problems even within the past couple of weeks.

I do not believe that the majority consensus in this RfC would necessarily oppose allowing PC to remain, for the interim period until we make a final decision here, ''on this limited subset of BLP articles''. For some of them, there seems to be no good alternative to leaving PC intact: semiprotecting does not protect against defamation of article subjects by determined enemies or harassers who register sleeper socks and take the trouble to get autoconfirmed; and full protection would be an overreaction (and if instituted ''faute de mieux'' in the absence of PC, would be a far more drastic limitation on the ability to edit than PC is; I do not understand any argument that full-protection of an article is a better state for it to be in than pending-changes).

Therefore, my current inclination is to allow a limited exception to the termination of the PC trial, for the interim period (defined as the period in which the longer-term status of PC/FR is under discussion, up to 90 days), in which an administrator would be permitted to apply PC status to an article provided that:

*The article is substantially the biography of a living person; ''and''

*The article has been subject to severe or persistent vandalism, defamation, or harassment of the article subject; ''and''

*The administrator placing the article under pending changes promises to watchlist the article and to urge other users to do so, so that proposed edits will be processed within a reasonable period of time.

If this exception is allowed during the interim period (which I've defined as lasting no more than about 90 days), like the termination of the PC trial in all other respects, it will be entirely without prejudice to the ultimate fate of PC/FR as decided in the future. It also would be meant to apply to a reasonably limited number of articles; it is not meant to be an exception that would swallow the rule.

Comments on this proposal will be appreciated, within the next 7 days. With the possible exception outlined above, the PC trial should be considered in its final stages of winding down, with a deadline of 7 days from today.

====Suggestions for the longer term====

I also indicated in my closing that I would provide some suggestions for discussion of the next phase of PC/FR.

I think that some prior discussions and attempts to gauge consensus have foundered because the community was trying to discuss too many issues at the same time, and because the continuum of options was not broken out well enough to gauge support for each.

Basically, I think there are three separate—although of course related—discussions to be had.

(1) The discussion of whether we want to have PC/FR at all. I think that any RfC or poll needs to be broken down within the following continuum of options:

*No PC/FR at all.

*PC/FR only for a very narrow subset of articles (e.g., exceptionally problematic BLPs).

*PC/FR only for a specific but not especially narrow subset of articles (e.g., all BLPs, or all articles with high vandalism rates, etc.).

*PC/FR on a majority of articles (perhaps with a subset of non-PC articles designed to introduce the wiki experience to newcomers).

*PC/FR on all articles.

I think an RfC page presenting these options, perhaps with some tweaking of the wording or categories, could help bring us closer to knowing what consensus is, or indeed whether there is any hope of consensus being achieved at all. (I am not addressing here the "meta" question of what we should do if community opinion remains widely scattered among these options and we don't have any decision at all; suffice unto the day....) My suggestion is that an RfC among these options be set up to begin about 10 days from now, be widely publicized, and remain open for 45 days to obtain as broad in put as possible. We could then follow with a phase that would yield a specific final outcome within the selected option.

(2) The technical discussion. Features of PC/FR, how it should work, issues concerning the interface, and the like. I'm not an expert on these issues, so will defer in suggesting how this RfC page might best be set up in favor of those who are. I think this phase of an RfC could proceed in parallel with (1) and on more-or-less the same timetable.

(3) The personnel and operational issues. E.g., how we should select reviewers, what the criteria should be for accepting or rejecting edits, etc. This phase of the discussion, I think, would need to follow (1) and (2).

Comments on how the next phase of PC/FR input should proceed, including on my suggested methodology for RfCs as set forth just above, are also invited, within the next 7 days.

====[[tl;dr]] version====

*For the most part, the pending changes trial is over, and we'll proceed to a discussion of whether the community wants to have pending changes enabled long-term.

*Because there hasn't been enough publicity about this fact and there are still some articles left that administrators need to go through, the deadline for assessing articles under PC (and substituting semiprotection or whatever where warranted) is extended for 7 days. This is a final extension.

*We might want to allow a limited exception to terminating the trial for some high-risk BLPs. I need more comments on this, within the next 7 days.

*I've outlined a possible format for the next phase of the RfC, which will deal with the longer-term future of pending changes or flagged revisions. I request comments on this also within 7 days, so that we can get the RfC open within a few days after that.

I hope these comments and suggestions are helpful. [[User:Newyorkbrad|Newyorkbrad]] ([[User talk:Newyorkbrad|talk]]) 00:21, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

=== Final closure statement ===

In my second set of closing comments one week ago, I extended for 7 days the time within which pending changes status must be removed on any articles that still had it. That period expires today, but I understand that the process of removing PC on the remaining articles in the trial was completed a few days ago (albeit with an unanticipated hiccup or two along the way).