Wikipedia:PC2012/RfC 1

There are several valid points raised by both sides in this discussion. Supporters of Level 2 Pending Changes argue based on two main points. One, it would open certain pages prone to problematic edits (such as highly-visible templates or little-watched articles about living people) to editing with a much lower risk of said edits being visible. Such pages are currently fully protected or semiprotected, and require users without the necessary access levels to make edit requests, and supporters contend that this would make these sorts of articles more open. Secondly, it would help keep attacks from autoconfirmed sockpuppets from becoming visible while simultaneously allowing edits from other good faith users to go through. Opponents of Level 2 Pending Changes are both against it altogether or against it as is. Those who are completely against it in any form argue that it is too complex (whether or not PC in and of itself is already too complex) and that it would create/add to stratification among editors. Some also argued that existing options (semiprotection, full protection, or PC Level 1) work fine and they couldn't see any situation where it would be preferable to other options. Finally, a few stated that it would give administrators and reviewers the ability to exert ownership articles. I do not think the final argument is compatible with our guideline on assuming good faith, and have therefore given it no weight, but the other arguments I have carefully considered. There are also some users who are not against the concept of Level 2 Pending Changes, but against it as is. Specifically, these users want to see a concrete policy laid out before it is used, as they believe it could potentially be misused if such a policy doesn't exist. Of particular note, for this and future discussions, is the nearly universal rejection of using PC Level 2 for content disputes. Given all of this, I would have to say the result is no consensus, which would default to not using PC level 2 for the time being. We will leave discussions about PC level 2 until we have used PC level 1 as a community for 3-6 months. By then, we will have a better idea of how PC works, and people can work out a policy and come up with/adjust their views in accordance with that. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 23:05, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The administrators who closed May's Request for Comment (RfC) on Pending Changes determined that it should be implemented around the end of 2012, but asked the community to continue working on the Pending Changes draft policy, noting that opposers had pointed out potential problems and supporters were not uniform in what they were supporting. Following extensive discussions, this is the first in a series of RfCs designed to answer these questions before some form of Pending Changes goes live. This RfC is on one of the less controversial questions – the role (if any) of Pending Changes Level Two – in the hope that the community will be able to come to a quick decision on this one, and in the process, join in developing a more elaborate RfC to follow.

Pending Changes currently has two levels of protection, Level 1 (PC/1) and Level 2 (PC/2):

• When a page with PC/1 protection is edited by an unregistered user or new user, that edit and all following edits by any user are not included in the article displayed to the general public (that is, for readers who are not logged in), until the edits are approved by someone with the "reviewer" user right.
• When a page with PC/2 protection is edited by a non-reviewer, not just unregistered and new users, that edit and all following edits by any user are not included in the article displayed to the general public, until the edits are approved by a reviewer.

Please indicate your support for or opposition to PC/2. Any replies to voters or longer rationales should go in the Discussion section. 14:13, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Also see #Vote on closure below. 11:49, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Please indicate your support by inserting your signature (and, optionally, a brief statement).

1. Support - from table, gives a couple of levels of protection below full protection allowing more editing to take place by non-admins. Tom B (talk) 13:19, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
2. Support I am deeply sympathetic to many of the concerns expressed by those opposing PC2, and I suspect their sentiments will carry the day. However, I continue to believe that there is an important use case for PC2. In my work with very infrequently edited biographies of living people, I have found a few cases, a very few cases, for which there have been consistent, infrequent, but very problematic sorts of vandalism and attacks. In at least two such cases the problems stem from editors willing to seek out new IPs and work through the wait to build auto-confirmed accounts. I feel that in those cases, PC2 would be a better alternative to indefinite full protection, but at this point, if PC2 is rejected, I'll feel that I have have little alternative. I believe that PC2 with stringent limitations on frequency of editing (there's *no* good use case I can see for PC2 on frequently edited articles) would be a reasonable way to address potential concerns of overuse and abuse. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:58, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. I think that there shouldn't be a full-out ban on PC2, but that it should be used with discretion in a few limited cases. Extreme BLP problems, as Joe Decker points out above, or pages persistently targeted by sockpuppeteers. But since the potential for abuse (as the opposers say) is there, it should only be used in very few cases. David1217 ^{What I've done} 18:06, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
4. Support leaving it in the toolbox, but specifically oppose authorizing its use in to respond to edit warring. I think there are some specific uses that deserve consideration, and it would be better to not reject PC/2 out of hand until they are each considered at an RFC. Monty₈₄₅ 21:54, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
5. Support pending changes is great for stopping edit warring of any kind while still allowing constructive edits to go through with review. It's also great for filtering out vandalism while allowing other IPs to edit without the need to proxy through edit requests which can really be a hassle for some.—cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 01:12, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
6. Support by only for use on infrequently (eg a few a month, not including the reverts) edited articles (biographies and others), where full protection is the only other option, but oppose it's use in edit wars and on pages which are edited regularly. Regarding waiting until PC is active to intoduce it, I agree with the concerns on both sides. I agree that it would be good to wait until PC/1 is active so that we can see how it's working. However, I also agree that leaving it until it is active may very well result in the addition of PC/2 being opposed purely (or partly) because of an aversion to change. My suggestion would be to have it active at the same time as PC/1, but with the restrictions I (and others) have mentioned as well as it being on a 6-12 month trial basis. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 09:07, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
7. Support. I don't see a problem. We've needed to do something like this for a long time. Everyking (talk) 14:01, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
8. Unenthusiastic support as better than nothing. PC1 seems kind of pointless as it would only restrict brand-new users in most cases, which is generally better handled by semiprotection. Wikipedia is not being helped by these constant votes and discussions on the same thing, over and over. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 15:33, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
9. Qualified support. I would support the use of PC2 iff it is restricted to being used only in cases where there is a history of vandalism (not content disputes, not edit wars - vandalism) by autoconfirmed accounts. This could include articles and templates known to be repeated targets of "sleeper sock" vandalism. This should not include articles where the issue is good-faith editorial conflict of any kind. It may be possible and/or desirable in the future to expand the use of PC2, but it just as well may not. For the time being, I am only willing to support the implementation of PC2 under the restrictions I described above. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 18:38, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
10. Support for use when autoconfirmed accounts are being used to vandalize, when the only alternative is full protection, which only lets admins edit. Reaper Eternal (talk) 19:33, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    Considering the threshold for autoconfirmed has a not-insignificant time period requirement, when autoconfirmed accounts are being used to vandalize I'd think indef blocks and possibly an SPI would be a better form of damage control. PC/2 patches over the problem but doesn't deal with the threat. Sven Manguard Wha? 16:35, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    If there are one or two autoconfirmed accounts, then blocks would be fine, but if there are many autoconfirmed accounts being used to vandalize, too many to deal with individually, then PC/2 should work, without having to go through an SPI. --Mysterytrey 16:59, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    Checkuser is not magic pixie dust. "SPI would be better", but only if a CU can actually connect the accounts that way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:59, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

11. Support. PC/2 would be a nice alternative to cases where something may require more than the easy requirements of autoconfirmed, while still not requiring those who want to make changes to be required to go through a process like RfA. --Mysterytrey 00:56, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
12. Support Editing a PC/2-protected page sort of like submitting an edit request to a fully protected page, except there 8,035 reviewers and only 846 admins. HueSatLum 22:36, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
13. Support for limited use, and specifically for use on pages that have been under long-term full protection (especially templates) and pages that have seen severe vandalism and BLP problems from sutoconfirmed socks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:12, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
14. Support its use in lieu of semi-protection in vandalism cases, esp. on biographies of living persons. Marcus Qwertyus (talk) 02:48, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
15. Support especially for vulnerable BLPs. JN466 03:54, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
16. Support as long as it is treated with the same seriousness as full protection is treated today. Gigs (talk) 18:35, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
17. Support. It'll be useful to have a tool milder than fullprot available, provided the admins manning WP:RFPP have the good sense to apply the least restrictive form of protection/pc that will a) be effective in solving the problem b) without giving one faction an advantage in a content dispute. Kilopi (talk) 04:53, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
18. Support per Jayen466 - vulnerable low-activity BLPs are good candidates for this. Edit-warring: no (use blocks or semi or full). If opponents' concerns can only be met by developing much clearer guidelines for use to explicitly exclude cases where it wouldn't help, I'm fine with that. Rd232 ^talk 12:03, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
19. Support While acknowledging the concerns about it locking out editors, we already do that with full protection. This would be a way to actually let more editors contribute at a continuous pace and largely erase the need for full protection. As to the comments about edit wars, it would certainly not prevent them, but it would prevent an edit war from stopping all improvements to an article. Rather than an IP having to go to the talk page to request an admin correct a mistake or violation, the IP can do it and a reviewer approve it, recognizing that this is an improvement unrelated to the edit war.--The Devil's Advocate (talk) 18:40, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
20. Support. On the subject of full protection, this won't replace full protection and that'll still be necessary to stop edit warring. I don't agree that full protection on BLPs will be a substitute for this, as filing an edit request is much harder for new/anonymous editors than simply making the edit to be reviewed.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:51, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
21. Support, mainly for low-activity BLPs, per Jayen466 and The Devil's Advocate (and whoever else above said that and I just didn't remember). Theopolisme 13:43, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
22. Support - "Pending changes" 1 and 2, like semi- and full- edit-protection, should be available but, like edit-protection, should be used sparingly. The alternative to not having PC/2 is what we have now: fully-protected articles that don't really need to be fully-protected. My hope is that PC/1 will reduce the number of semi-protected articles and PC/2 will reduce the number of fully protected ones. However, if there is not enough support for PC/2 to avoid spending huge amounts of time discussing implementation details later, then just drop PC/2 for now and revisit it later. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:06, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
23. Support - I don't think that anyone wants it used frequently, but it would be nice to have steps in between semi-protection and full protection. Dori ☾Talk ☯ Contribs☽ 22:53, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
24. Conditional Support - In agreement with several other people who voted support, I will only support this if and only if there has been an established history of vandalism from autoconfirmed accounts. Because autoconfirmed accounts aren't a "safe" flag, rather it is a spam filter to prevent spam from accounts that have been just created. Michaelzeng7 (talk) 20:12, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
25. Support, so long as its use is quite sparing. There is a need for a protection level higher than semi-protection but less than pull. PC level 1, on the other hand, still strikes me as spectacularly useless.—Kww(talk) 11:47, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
26. Support - Useful anti-vandalism tool. Carrite (talk) 16:50, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
27. Support More steps in between protection are useful. Dan653 (talk) 23:46, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Please indicate your opposition by inserting your signature (and, optionally, a brief statement).

1. The main reason Wikipedia went from zero to half a billion readers per month with volunteer editors was that people were attracted to being able to edit without being supervised, without having to wait for approval by "official" Wikipedians for their edits. I have spent a lot of time talking with people about PC/2 since the May RfC, and the best I can tell, there's not much support for it. - Dank (push to talk) 11:40, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   Current methods of protection also have editors wait for their edits to be approved. Do you oppose current methods of protection also? --Mysterytrey 23:05, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   Reply at #Reply to Mysterytrey; we're asking people not to reply in this section (to give everyone "equal time" before the back-and-forth starts). - Dank (push to talk) 02:17, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

2. During the May RfC there was intense opposition to Pending Changes. I had voted to support it, but after the close I re-read many of the arguments and realized that PC has some major problems. Many of the concerns raised by opposers would be resolved by getting rid of PC/2: for instance the concerns that PC would give reviewers the ability to "own" protected articles, and that it would scare off regular users who felt suddenly demoted to a lower status would no longer be an issue. I would like for the community to come together on a compromise before PC goes live, and this would be a huge step in that direction. Besides, vandalism from autoconfirmed users is easily remedied by blocks, so PC/2 isn't needed the same way PC/1 is. ~Adjwilley (talk) 13:35, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. PC2 is considerably more contentious than PC1, and it has a higher potential for abuse. I could see it having a role if it is used very rarely (in circumstances when we would now use full protection for reasons other than edit warring), but I'm not persuaded that it will be used like that. Hut 8.5 15:07, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
4. PC2 would not improve upon our existing blocking policy as far as edit warring is concerned. Where a larger number of established users are causing a significant problem, full protection is an appropriate course of action: in these circumstances we want all editing to stop, discussion to accelerate, and admins to action {{editprotected}} requests once there appears to be a consensus. I'm sure arguments in favour of PC2 could be made, but I'm not convinced that the benefits would outweigh the damage that PC2 would do to our existing editor base. — — — Why doesn't the same logic apply to PC1? Because full protection puts all editors on an equal footing (an admin substantially editing a protected page without consensus constitutes clear-cut abuse), and therefore it is not particularly harmful to fully protect pages where absolutely necessary. On the other hand, semi-protection disadvantages a certain subset of users, and yet in practise it does not change the behavior of registered users. Therefore, semi-protection should only be used where there is no viable alternative, and with the right policy PC1 will be a step towards that. —WFC— 16:02, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
5. I have never understood what the point of PC2 is and have yet to see any situation where it would be preferable to either semi or full protection. I believe most participants in the previous RFC were much more concerned with PC1 and that few users even understand what PC2 is. This is only going to work if we keep it simple, at least at first. let's ankle PC2 for the time being. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
6. My worry is the same as Hut 8.5's. I can certainly see how this could be useful in rare situations. I'm just worried it will be applied way too often. There may be controls on it that would make me willing to accept it, but I think any controls I'd be okay with would make it nearly useless in practice. Hobit (talk) 00:59, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   In particular I could see it being useful on otherwise fully-protected templates. I could also imagine it being useful for the rarely edited BLPs. But I worry that the cost--an effective "super editor" class who can get their edits up quickly--will be too high. I also worry that no matter how we restrict it now, it's use will continue to grow over time as all the "cool kids" will have the needed access. Full protection is so limited in use now, in part, because many of the regulars don't have the bit. If it's just the unwashed masses... I also think WFC has identified a very real issue. Hobit (talk) 01:05, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

7. I'm of much the same mind as some of the above, especially Beeblebrox. Considering the controversy, I'd certainly hope that admins wouldn't use pending changes to "own" articles, as it would only serve to cause massive firestorms. Also, to put it simply, in situations where PC1 would not target the correct users but PC2 would, we are dealing with behavioral problems by established users, and that is best dealt with using existing processes (namely page protection, forced talk page mediation, and in many cases, blocks.) Sven Manguard Wha? 05:04, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
8. I generally oppose the idea of creating ever more tiers of status and privilege. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:10, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
9. Oppose, because there's no clear agreed guidelines about when and how PC2 is to be applied. I definitely don't want to see our admin corps making up the rules as they go along with this. First the guidelines, discussed and agreed, then switch on the tool.—S Marshall T/C 19:16, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
10. When there is so much dispute about how even the relative less obtrusive PC1 is to be used, to begin discussing this seems vey premature. If we get enough experience in the trial from PC1 to feel some degree of confidence about it, then we can continue to this. My preliminary opinion would be that this is over-drastic action for rare special cases--very little in the way of real problems has been demonstrated . If enough people are sure of that on that point, perhaps we would do better to discard it altogether to the extent of requiring a new proposal from scratch. DGG ( talk ) 23:00, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
11. Unlike PC1, PC2 would address a type of problem that other methods short of full protection fail to address. For that reason, implementing PC2 and deprecating PC1 were key components of my revised policy proposal some weeks ago. Nevertheless, in the absence of anything approaching consensus yet on the extent of PC's purposes (official and permissible), and given that I'm finding some of the comments in the previous section a little alarming, I find myself growing skeptical that implementing PC2 could possibly be a net plus for the project. Specifically, I am not confident that sufficient protections would be put in place in time to minimize the very real risk of misuse that PC2 inevitably carries if it's sloppily implemented. Also, DGG's comment has reminded me that my initial opposition, dating to a discussion of flagged revisions several years ago, was based principally on the lack of a demonstrated problem. While I'm sure the problem that PC2 would address exists, I have seen no evidence that it occurs with sufficient frequency to warrant a response as drastic as PC2. Bottom line/tl,dr version: weak oppose on going forward with PC2. Rivertorch (talk) 06:34, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
12. Opposed for 2 reasons: First, there would be too much potential for abuse; situations that people have mentioned for possible PC2 use would be bettered handled through different avenues. Also, having so many tiers of protection is likely to cause confusion and arguments about when it is appropriate to apply each level. If we just have 1 level of PC, the guidelines on PC use will hopefully be simple, clear, and easy to remember. Kaldari (talk) 06:44, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
13. Oppose as it is contrary to WP:OWN. PC-2 forces all the users to get their contributions reviewed by a small number of right-holders. EngineerFromVega^★ 08:20, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    Current methods of protection also forces users to get their contributions reviewed by a small number of right-holders. Do you oppose current methods of protection also? --Mysterytrey 23:05, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    Current full-protection is used in very rare circumstances and even with that, Administrators are not supposed to edit a page without gaining consensus on the related talk pages. Also, Administrator user right is given after a thorough community vetting, which is not the case with the reviewer user right. In short, PC2 is not exactly similar to the current full protection system we have. Also, for the same reasons, I'm in support for PC1. EngineerFromVega^★ 05:59, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

14. Oppose. I think the concept behind Level 2 is severely flawed. It puts autoconfirmed users in the position of needing to have their edits reviewed by users who have the reviewer permission. If a page needs that kind of supervision, it would be better to simply full-protect it. Instead, we would have two levels of users who could review edits: administrators, who have been vetted through RfA, and reviewers, who have been vetted... how? At the present time, we have lots of users who have the reviewer flag from the last time PC was tried. Many of them got the permission without even asking for it. Many of them got it with minimal evaluation, because the administrators who gave out the permission had no real guidance, beyond a vague sense of probably won't break the Wiki. So now, we would have those users mediating controversial edits amongst editors who may very well be more trusted than they are. If someone is going to be able to pass or fail edits by established editors, without discussion, they should have undergone as much scrutiny as in RfAs. I strongly urge editors who are working on PC to put some serious effort into defining the qualifications for the reviewer flag, and those qualifications will have to include removing the flag from everyone who has it now, and starting over again. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:20, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
15. Oppose. The cost is the creation of a further class division between editors. A large number of editors who may or may not be able to use the right correctly will feel compelled to get it just to avoid the demeaning experience of having to wait around while their betters judge their edits. It will create whole new volumes of drama to sap everyone's inner being. And it will be abused left, right and centre. Which we'll just have to live with, since we will never reach a consensus about what abuse looks like. On the other hand, there is absolutely no upside. Formerip (talk) 23:00, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
16. The few cases it makes sense, which IMO are pretty much limited to high-risk, low-traffic BLP's can be served just as efficiently with full protection, without having to clean the history of all the garbage that makes the BLP sensitive to begin with. The couple BLP's I can think of that were under this situation, when under semi, were pretty much magnets for oversight attention. Given this can't be used to solve an edit war -- folks would just go right on reverting and get blocked, or find the talk page (which full would have accomplished easier) that I'm left seeing no real use for this feature. Courcelles 02:55, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
17. Too likely to be abused in content disputes, favours certain users' views on content over those of others and, unlike PC/1, without a significant benefit. wctaiwan (talk) 14:41, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    Could you explain what made you think this is more likely to be abused than current page protection? --Mysterytrey 23:00, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

    Replied at my own talk page. wctaiwan (talk) 03:29, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

18. I am not convinced that pending changes protection, in any form, is a net benefit. The two proposed variants are just overly complicated forms of the existing protection options.  Sandstein  06:27, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
19. I had to edit one such article in the past. Despite the fact there was no obvious reason for it to be placed on PC2, it was. It also had a pretty big of various problems. Editing it was extremely cumbersome. None of the admins bothered to do much besides tagging and occasionally approving an edit. [1] [2] [3] It was one of the proximate experiences that made me take a long wiki-break. (The other was ArbComGovCom endorsing that crap.) Tijfo098 (talk) 23:26, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
20. Oppose per hut. Sounds great, in theory (assuming the Reviewers will be NPOV as the driven snow). In practice, its going to end up creating a tier dedicated to content judgment calls: a mini-ArbCom as it were. I don't think that's the intent. But in the long run, AGF toward Reviewers is going to really tough for reverted editors to keep. Much harder than it is now.--Robert Keiden (talk) 00:38, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
21. While pending changes level 2 could be useful for pages protected for purely technical reasons, such as highly-transcluded templates and files, editrequests on talkpages seem to work just fine on this project, and would still be required if folks want to discuss the change first even if PC2 were used. Especially considering the potential for abuse with general content, PC2 really doesn't seem worth it. Not that I consider level 1 worth all this trouble either, but that's a separate issue. -— Isarra ༆ 21:41, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
22. Oppose because it doesn't make sense. Requiring the edits of autoconfirmed and confirmed users to be approved seems strange. Why not just use full proection? --Thegreatgrabber (talk) 01:13, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have trouble imagining that people will want to use PC2, but I'm also having trouble convincing myself that it's such an apocalyptic issue that we need to ban it completely. PC2 would have the effect of making changes by anyone except the ~7,000 reviewers (including all admins) get reviewed by one of those 7,000 people before being displayed to readers. If it were actually used for OWNership, I'd expect a quick request for unprotection to be approved. So why bother totally banning it? It might be preferable to full protection for the occasional article, e.g., one targeted by a determined sock. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:12, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've been on a quest to talk with people about Pending Changes since May, and the main thing I've found out is that what makes this complicated is that Pending Changes isn't Pending Changes, it's a reflection of a bunch of different conflicts, some stalled since 2007. So, I've learned not to be judgmental if people are saying something that doesn't make sense to me, because if I talk with them long enough, it generally turns out that what they're saying makes perfect sense, in some other context. Having said that ... what you're saying doesn't make sense to me, WAID. PC/2 is a form of page protection, so an admin would only add it to a page if there's edit warring or fighting going on that doesn't have some other obvious solution. So: in the middle of a conflict, an admin shows up and adds protection that allows some of the combatants to edit at will and forces others to get approval for any edits. Do you know any Wikipedians who would respond well to being muzzled in this way in the middle of a dispute? - Dank (push to talk) 15:41, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(I'm sort of replying to Dank and WAID, sort of just musing out loud here...) PC/2 strikes me as useless (or worse) for edit warring situations. In an edit warring/content dispute situation where someone applies PC/2 thinking they can fix it, one of two things will happen: a) one or both warriors have the reviewer right, and push their edits through, or b) uninvolved reviewers end up being asked to make a content decision for which edit to send live. Neither of those things is acceptable. Yes, perhaps the warrior(s) who used their reviewer right in the conflict would lose the right, but we have edit wars all over Wikipedia, every day, and removing reviewer from editor X who warred in topic Y does nothing to stop incipient edit warring by editor Z in topic Q. We can't spend all day every day removing rights from edit warriors. However, I can envision PC/2 having some limited usefulness in cases where articles or templates are known to be attacked by sleeper socks. Where we now have templates full-protected to avoid particular kinds of trollish vandalism, we could fairly easily drop those to PC/2, which would allow good-faith non-admins to work with them but keep out (most) sleepers. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 15:55, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think consensus is going to develop among the supporters for the kind of restrictions you're suggesting, Fluffy, but if it does ... allowing non-admins to work in protected-template space is one of those problems that has resisted solution for a long time, and I agree it would be nice to have a solution of some kind. - Dank (push to talk) 16:26, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if such restrictions were implemented in policy (and assuming the pc software could handle it well), I'd probably support it, for whatever that is worth. -— Isarra ༆ 18:48, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Dan,

Like Fluffy, I don't see the point behind using PC2 for regular, high-speed edit wars. I do see the point behind using PC2 for very rare scenarios. So imagine an editor who wants to "fix" a controversial, but not commonly edited article like Mental retardation, e.g., to remove the name used by medical professionals all over the world in favor of the term du jour in his activist's group with a screed about how only bigots use the official term.

We semi'd the article years ago to deal with kids adding their classmates' names, but imagine that the sock is determined enough to create account after account, and to wait the four days and make the ten edits necessary to edit this article—for months on end. The article normally gets one edit every few days, but now it's going to get one POV pusher every four days for the rest of the year. To deal with this long-term sock, would you prefer:

1. long-term PC2,
2. long-term full protection, or
3. long-term abuse

on that article? Keep in mind that if it takes only 10 minutes to revert the abuse, then 15 readers have read it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:51, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. I think a better approach to limiting any potential for PC2 abuse is to look for the few use cases it makes sense, and insist on them. To start, I'd suggest a maximum frequency of editing, PC2 is, in my view, best applied to very infrequently edited (which we could set a limit on) biographies (again, an objective criterion), with a consistent and persistent vandal or attacker. But again, I'll be employing indefinite full protection as an alternative in those cases otherwise, so, y'all choose. --j⚛e decker^talk 17:04, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Joe, except that I wouldn't insist on the PC2-protected article being biographical. WhatamIdoing's, example shows why it might be needed on non-biographical articles. Yaris678 (talk) 17:24, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll reply at WT:PC2012/RfC 1#Persistent bad-faith edits. - Dank (push to talk) 17:46, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The argument given by WhatamIdoing is quite convincing, and I would agree that PC2 would be the best solution in this scenario. However with all of the potential problems we've got flying around right now, and the very little experience we have with pending changes, I think that overall the net benefit would be a negative. Maybe after a year of using PC/1, people will begin to say "Hey, this isn't so bad after-all" and "This is really useful. It would be nice to have PC/2 as an option as well." If/when that time comes, the policy can be changed with another RfC. I think for now, though, we need to learn to drive using PC/1 before experimenting with PC/2. ~Adjwilley (talk) 17:55, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think I agree with Adjwilley. I would be happy with a consensus conclusion to this RfC along the lines of "PC2 is suspended without prejudice. When Pending changes goes live (currently scheduled for November) it will comprise only PC1. We will revisit the issue at some future point when people are more comfortable with the workings of PC. The facility for PC2 should remain in the software for now but it should not be applied by admins unless or until a consensus to use it is reached." Yaris678 (talk) 18:42, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps can it be implemented with something like "PC2 is only to be used in cases of severe sockpuppet disruption, extreme BLP issues, or on high-risk templates, where full protection would otherwise be used. It is not to be used instead of full-protection to temper an editing dispute." Would that be okay? David1217 ^{What I've done} 18:52, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine we might end up with something like that if we get roughly equal numbers of supporters/opposers. The extent of using PC on BLP articles is likely going to be one of the issues that we discuss in the next RfC. Also, until the developers rewrite the software, I would advise against using PC on high-risk high-usage templates. As things currently stand, PC almost doubles page loading times, and many of our articles are currently being bogged down by templates. We don't need to slow them down even more. (I believe the loading time issue will be fixed eventually. I'm not sure when, or to what extent.) ~Adjwilley (talk) 19:41, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think that we could perhaps give those examples, and add "unless or until a consensus to use it is reached" for that article, i.e., if you think PC2 is warranted, then you need to have a formal discussion about using it for that particular article first, but not a big long debate over whether PC2 is inherently evil. But then, I feel the same way about full protection in excess of a day or so. Unilateral, long-term full protection usually makes me unhappy.

The example above of fully protected templates seems like another potentially appropriate area. Why not offer PC2 in a few instances to reduce the protection level? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:55, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think anything whose benefit above and beyond what we already have is so very murky it's best to just scrap it, at least for now. The simpler we keep this, the easier it will be to manage and the easier it will be for users to understand, a big problem during the trial. One of the most endorsed statements in the 2011 RFC was that PC is confusing. Keeping it restricted to level one only goea at leadt part of the way to addressing that concern. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:53, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps we should have a third option to !vote for: Wait until after the PC/1 implementation to further consider whether PC/2 should be implemented, and in what ways. Monty₈₄₅ 22:03, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Currently I see that there needs to be a tightly set restrictions on it if it gets used, as S Marshall's oppose said he doesn't want the admin corps to make it up on the go. It does look like the RFC 2 will be used for restrictions, but I might as well say here that I think the last bulletpoint in WP:PC/Provisional policy is something fairly tight, that could be enforced. Specifically, "Pending-changes protection should only be restricted to reviewers..." (PC2) "...on articles persistently targeted by sockpuppeteers with autoconfirmed accounts." --Mysterytrey 23:30, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Do you see RFC 2 as a hyperlink? I don't in the wikimarkup, but there is a link going to --Mysterytrey 23:39, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• If we formally reject PC/2 now, it may be a very uphill battle to revive it later, given the controversy, unless the close makes it clear we are only tabling it for later reconsideration and that we are not saying we never want it. Monty₈₄₅ 22:01, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You may note that my comment includes the words "at least at first" and " for the time being." Beeblebrox (talk) 05:50, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I only did notifications in the Signpost, at WP:CENT and at WT:FAC this time, and I'm happy with the level and tone of this RfC ... but there's a problem, we're not getting a representative sampling of voices. Pending Changes is, in part, a conflict between Metapedians and other less involved Wikipedians, and we're only hearing the Metapedian side of the arguments. I recommend Karyn Gladstone's short talk from Wikimania ... it starts at the 17:30 point. On average, there are 5 to 6 English Wikipedians per day reaching the 1000-article-edits mark. Many of them don't interact with the community at all; some of them don't even have talk pages. Nevertheless, over 90% of their edits "stick". I can tell you that people who make good edits but have generally avoided interaction with the community don't like PC/2 ... at all; details on request. But I don't particularly want to put up a watchlist notice trying to get them in here; we're making good progress understanding and responding to the points on both sides without all the drama. Rather than competing to see who can "win" what appears to be a close vote at the moment, I propose we try to come up with a compromise option that a lot of us can support ... it's clear enough what both sides want, it shouldn't be impossible to do that. There's been a suggestion that we simply put off PC/2 ... but I think if we're all working together well and we understand the issues, we ought to be able to come up with something better than "no comment". - Dank (push to talk) 22:21, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If I felt that we were capable of enforcing Fluffernutter's suggestion, I could live with PC2 remaining on those grounds. But without a watertight policy, leaving PC2 on would be a net negative for the reasons given above. —WFC— 08:11, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are a couple of things I'd really prefer to say privately ... I don't want to give the bad guys any ideas. In fact, let's make that a vote ... - Dank (push to talk) 11:28, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I believe it comes down to what are the desired objectives for this deployment of pending changes, and what are their relative importance? (For example, what is the relative priority of addressing long-term vandalism by auto-confirmed users on very stable articles, versus simplifying the new protection model, and so forth?) Thus the outcome of the next RFC should help determine the best approach for using (or not using) pending changes level 2 protection. isaacl (talk) 11:56, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

When we set this RfC up, we intended for it to run for a week because we didn't want to take the focus away from PC/1, which is what most people would rather talk about. I generally don't like to cut off debate while people are still talking, but in this case, if there's no clear consensus for one particular point of view after a week (which seems likely at the moment), is there any objection to trying to come up with a third option in a "committee" that anyone could join? - Dank (push to talk) 11:58, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. - Dank (push to talk) 11:49, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   FWIW, I'm on board with Isaac's and Hut's position: we obviously can't know the boundaries of PC/2 if we don't know the boundaries of PC/1, so a perfectly reasonable outcome from the committee IMO would be to put off another RfC until we see what happens with PC/1 discussions or PC/1 practice, or possibly to make our recommendations dependent on what happens with PC/1. But that's just my own position; I don't want to limit what the committee can or can't discuss before we've started ... the supporters are saying interesting things, and I want to hear more. (I also want to say more.) - Dank (push to talk) 16:23, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

2. Supporters and opposers make good points so I say close as no consensus for now and leave PC/2 as is for now.—cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 13:50, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. I think I support this. It looks like a straight yes/no is not going to get consensus. However, it looks like there are commonalities between both sides. We have a number of supporters saying "Support if only used to deal with vandalism by sockpuppets." and some opposers saying "Oppose because it isn't clear when this could be used." If this "committee" could look at that and turn it into a set of conditions on using PC2 that people can sign up to that is great. If the committee gets nowhere then I say we default to "suspend without prejudice" and then see how PC1 goes. Yaris678 (talk) 14:24, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
4. Sure. --j⚛e decker^talk 15:14, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
5. Seems reasonable to me - as people are noting, there's quite a commonality between what many of the supporters and opposers are saying. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 15:41, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
6. Yeah: if we can't decide between two options, let's find a third.—S Marshall T/C 16:33, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
7. Sounds fine to me too. All the votes from supporters and opposers seem reasonable, and I'm sure we can come up with a compromise solution that would mostly satisfy both sides. If I were to frame the compromise myself I'd probably say something along the lines of not rolling out PC/2 for a year (or some comparable period of time) and after that have it start on a very limited basis (only for persistent auto-confirmed vandalism yada yada). Throw in the understanding that the decision will be able to be modified in the future (based on feedback from PC/1) and we're good to go. Also, I'm not sure how this "committee" is going to work, but you can count me in. ~Adjwilley (talk) 18:48, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
8. Fine. I had a comment prepared, but I'll just say "per Yaris678". Rivertorch (talk) 19:13, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
9. I don't think PC/2 has much of a chance to get my support, but I'm willing to see what folks come up with. Hobit (talk) 19:51, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
10. Good idea, and I agree with Dank's second comment. David1217 ^{What I've done} 21:45, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
11. Good idea, as with David I agree with Dank's second comment. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 08:54, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. Don't think this would help. The third option would presumably be something like "PC2 can only be used to prevent X", or "PC2 can only be used when an article is subject to Y level of disruption". Since we haven't had community consultation on what pending changes should be used for at all yet (it looks like the main RfC will be used for that purpose) there doesn't seem to be much point in deciding for PC2 separately, especially as the two RfCs may come to differing conclusions. Instead I suggest that in the event that the result of this discussion is "no consensus" that the issue be revisited after we have come to some decision about what pending changes should be used for in general. Hut 8.5 15:49, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   Re Dank: I don't see how the committee could come up with another recommendation that would address the issues raised here while not interfering with the other RfC that's planned for later. To address the concerns we would have to come up with a policy on when the tool can be applied and what we are going to do to prevent WP:OWN issues from arising. Hut 8.5 19:10, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

2. I agree with Hut. if it is thought that there is not clear consensus to simply reject this altogether, it would seem premature to even consider it now before PC1 is discussed & some agreement reached. I do not know why it was desired to even discuss this now, but it will only complicate issues. ` DGG ( talk ) 23:16, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   I don't want to get too "meta", but at the moment, it's looking like this paid off. In the last RfC, many of the comments on both sides weren't responsive to comments on the other side, and a general sense of grouchiness and disbelief was in evidence. In this one, people are reading each other's comments, taking each other seriously, and agreeing on a course of action. Quite a change. So now we've got a wider spectrum of input than we've had so far at WT:PC2012, which will be very helpful as we develop the tougher RfC to follow. Also, I personally felt that some of the PC/2 stuff had the potential to drag us down unless we got it out of the way first; we'll see. - Dank (push to talk) 23:29, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   you asked me on my talk page if i accept having it closed, with your comment that you expect the closure will be to send it to committee. As I opposed having this discussion in the first place, I will presumably accept anything likely to end it or postpone it. But the apparent 11:2 vote to which you referred took place one week ago, before most of the discussion below, and is therefore irrelevant. If you want a vote on closure that reflects the discussion, start a new motion. DGG ( talk ) 19:57, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   Okay. - Dank (push to talk) 21:17, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If no consensus is apparent after a week, I suggest putting the question on hold until there is a better understanding of the relative priorities of this deployment of pending changes. This should help determine the best way to use pending changes level 2 protection, or if it should be left unused for now. isaacl (talk) 11:56, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That seems like a "support" (with an explanation) to me, because committee work removes PC/2 from the main focus of discussion. It also lets you say more than you can generally get away with saying in an RfC (a lesson I obviously haven't learned :) - Dank (push to talk) 13:20, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

By default, if there is no consensus, naturally any interested parties can work further on a solution; no one can stop them, after all. However, personally I believe this work would benefit from waiting for the results of other polls, for the reasons I stated previously. It may as well join the rest of the strawmen proposals that will be generated at that time, based on all of the feedback. isaacl (talk) 14:45, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

@Cyberpower: IMO, closing as no consensus is fine, but leaving the policy as is would be very bad. The right thing to do would be to close to rewrite the policy to address the concerns of the people who voted. The Opposers don't want to see PC/2 at all (for now, at least). The Supporters want to keep it as an option, but most of them want to see it having a very limited role. The current policy is very broad, saying that it can be used for vandalism, BLP, edit warring, non-constructive editing and basically whatever you want. We should rewrite the policy to say something along the lines of "We shouldn't use it for the first year" or "Its use should be limited only to the most extreme cases of long-term autoconfirmed vandalism, and only as an alternative to full-protection." ~Adjwilley (talk) 14:07, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• What's important to me is that this is closed in a way which recognises that the community wants to look into PC2 on the condition that there are policy restrictions on its use. If a week is long enough to reasonably draw that conclusion, fine, but one way or another a decision needs to be made. —WFC— 15:37, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If we want a final resolution of the issue, it may be more effective to structure an RFC on a per use basis: Support PC/2 for high risk/visibility templates, Oppose PC/2 for high risk/visibility templates, Support/Oppose for edit warring, etc... and then finally an oppose it for any use option. Though I still think it makes sense to suspend PC/2 for now, and hold that RFC after PC/1 has been implemented for awhile. Monty₈₄₅ 15:47, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Using any kind of PC on templates is a bad idea. I did a test bit ago where I transcluded a test page into my user space and it just showed the latest version of the test page. Arguably this is something that the devs could deal with but for the moment lets just avoid using PC on templates.

In terms of your general idea, I think that may be the way we could approach it in the future if we decide to suspend PC2 for now. If we did the multiple questions before the start of the main RfC it would just delay things. Also, there will be a much wider understanding of PC in the community after the main roll out so more people will be in a position to have an informed opinion about such details on PC2.

Yaris678 (talk) 16:14, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree about the templates. In the mean time, I'm not seeing a huge need to cut the RfC short. Having it running isn't preventing us from moving on to other issues. I think that we can safely assume that the close will be to the effect of having a drastically limited scope for PC/2, at least initially, that is. We can work with that assumption to help us frame the next RfC. ~Adjwilley (talk) 17:06, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Based on previous discussion here over the very long time this has been an issue, a decision that we want it to have a very limited scope will be misinterpreted as saying that we want to do it but with a very limited scope. What I think is intended, is saying that if we even want to discuss this , it would be on the basis of having a much more limited scope. If that is the view, the clearest way is to just reject it for now with the option which always exists to propose it sometime later. Putting it to a committee is to complicate matters, and run the risk that the committee's decision will become the default without it being really intended. Let's face it, we're lousy at trying to imitate formal parliamentary procedure. A plain and simple rejection is what I think is called for--I think this is out of scope of the basic proposal that it was decided that the plurality accepted, but if there is not consensus for doing that just yet, just withdraw it at least for the time being. DGG ( talk ) 23:48, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the comment above that making an edit that is held in a pending queue is easier than making an edit request, note this is an artifact of the current user interface. It is, in theory, possible to alter the interface so that an edit to a fully protected article results in an edit request on the talk page. Yes, it would be more tricky (and perhaps more trouble than it's worth) to do this in a way that let you have a sequence of edit requests that build upon each other; in a sense, pending changes can be considered as a way to simplify supporting multiple edit requests, with the edit requests appearing in the article history rather than on the talk page. isaacl (talk) 06:40, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A few people keep arguing that it would not be useful for cases of edit-warring, but I have to disagree. See the current situation with Paul Ryan's bio for a clear example where PC/2 would be very helpful in addressing a situation primarily concerned with edit-warring by autoconfirmed editors. Non-contentious additions could be handled more easily while anything contentious or that would continue the edit war could be kept out. The ANI discussion over extending the current full protection for Ryan has seen a lot of objections to the effect that it would basically prevent non-contentious improvements to the article. PC/2 would be able to address those sorts of objections. I would definitely think it should be clear that such actions should be strictly time-limited with durations longer than a few months only for articles such as those most commonly mentioned above such as low-activity BLPs.--The Devil's Advocate (talk) 03:44, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In what way do you believe non-contentious improvements would be addressed by pending changes level 2? Is it because you feel reviewers will be able to review proposed changes more rapidly than admins? isaacl (talk) 04:55, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The obvious points are that reviewers are more numerous, but there is also the fact that not every random IP, new editor, or even autoconfirmed editor is going to want to use Requested Edit as a means to have someone else improve the article. It lessens the amount of effort that needs to be exerted by all parties and thus lowers the difficulty threshold for making contributions to protected articles, while allowing the editor to retain some visible credit for making the change so the experience is also more intellectually rewarding.--The Devil's Advocate (talk) 06:09, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As discussed in the immediately preceding section, issues solely related to the user interface of making edit requests can be addressed in other ways. isaacl (talk) 00:43, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Most of our active and valuable editors aren't reviewers and never will be, either because they don't want to be or because they don't interact much with the community (see Karyn's research above). Article-space is often a competitive environment; you're competing for your edits to stick and to have your point of view respected. If a page gets long-term PC/2 protection and you're not a reviewer, you've just been publicly demoted; your edits don't show up until other editors, some of whom you may feel you're competing with, approve your edits. Anyone here would lose at least a little confidence in this situation ... but imagine how much worse it would be if you weren't particularly comfortable on Wikipedia, didn't know the community well, and had other places you were just as happy editing. Or don't imagine; just ask non-Metapedians, and they'll tell you. If you're skeptical and you're not interested in the research the Foundation has done, then we can always run the experiment: we can put long-term PC/2 protection on articles that non-Metapedians feel some attachment to, and see how they respond ... hopefully we won't need to run that experiment for very long before the point gets made. Bad-faith editors, POV pushers ... and anyone else who would like to get an advantage over non-reviewers on their favorite articles, which is a lot of people ... will quickly figure out that long-term PC/2 protection is a powerful tool they can use to get rid of non-reviewers; all they have to do is foster the kind of environment that is likely to trigger PC/2 protection. The bad-faith editors could create throwaway accounts and vandalize the articles; more upstanding citizens could just be generally grouchy and uncompromising, and hope for the worst. Bottom line: if long-term PC/2 protection is an option, it's likely to be deliberately triggered in an attempt to drive away good-faith editors. (There are some proposals for "enhanced PC/1" that don't suffer this defect and might be good enough for the supporters, btw.) - Dank (push to talk) 18:04, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If this is likely to happen with PC2, shouldn't we expect to see that also happening with semi- or full-protection right now? That is, do we actually have the problem that people will deliberately log out to vandalize an article to get it semi'd, so their opponents can't edit it? Or do we have editors going into cahoots to stage an edit war so that someone will full-protect an article they don't want a third party to edit? If neither of these happens, or they happen exceptionally uncommonly (which is my impression) with protection, why would we assume that PC would automatically set editors off on a course of epic, manipulative evil that no one has shown any apparent interest in so far? I'm honestly quite bothered by the undercurrent to some opinions on PC (this being the latest - though I suspect Dank is putting it forth to play Devil's Advocate - and a number having occurred in previous RfCs, etc, also) that the mere existence of PC will cause editors who do not behave in bad faith currently to behave in bad faith, or that it will cause editors who intend bad faith to suddenly be allowed to act on that with no one gainsaying them, because somethingsomethingPCmakespeopleevil. If we're going to argue that people will surely use this new editing protections to wage war, we should do that on the basis of "see, here's where people currently use editing protections to wage war", not "well, but they MIGHT!" A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 20:48, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One solution for the ownership concern would be liberally handing out the reviewer right to all the active editors on any given article whenever you put a page under PC2. Then you've gone from "demoting the editor" to "promoting the editor". WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:27, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If all editors are reviewers, then there is no point to having PC2. Indeed, nobody's ever made the case for PC2 being beneficial in any way. In the interest of full disclosure, I support the notion of reviewer status being automatic after XX non-assisted edits to article space. Risker (talk) 21:32, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If the problem is a banned user who is willing to create as many auto-confirmed socks as necessary to work on an article, then imposing PC2 and handing the reviewer bit over to all the non-blocked ("active") editors who are working on that article seems like it would be an option that is less restrictive than full protection. That seems to me to be a point in its favor. Do you really think that stopping a sockmaster's long-term assaults on an article, while permitting the regular editors there to keep going, would be pointless? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:21, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

WhatamIdoing, I don't know if you realise this, but you have just advocated in favour of allowing the project to be held hostage by disruptive editors. If an editor can't behave on an article, remove him (permanently or for an extended period) from the article. If that editor exhibits the same behaviour elsewhere, remove him permanently from the project; he's not here for the right reasons. One does not institutionalize a way for disruptive editors to continue to insert their inappropriate edits into our content; given that the current rule for reviewers is that they are only supposed to reject vandalism, that means they'd have to accept the other edits and then someone else would come along and revert it...also requiring a reviewer's attention...rinse and repeat. Of course, if you want PC to be a content control tool, then that's a different story. But that's not what it's approved for. Risker (talk) 00:26, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Risker, I think the major flaw in your argument is this: Despite the best efforts of a good team of checkusers, we lack a reliable way of preventing person X from actually editing a specific article if they are willing to invest time and hard work into circumventing our processes and bans. We block and revert as we find them, and rangeblock as necessary, but protecting pages under attack from sockmasters is not being held hostage by them, it is using the tools we have to control a problem. There is a difference between "disruptive" editors, and banned ones. Topic bans work for people who may be disruptive but generally want to play by our rules and not lose their right to edit. Controlling the truly banned users by page protection when necessary may not be optimal, but saying that is being held hostage by them is something I must take issue with. Courcelles 03:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Courcelles, the proposal by WhatamIdoing does not propose any form of sanction on the user at all, but instead allowing them to continue pumping in edits that someone else then has to review, accept, revert. PC2 is not going to change the likelihood of a banned user editing a page; in fact, I'd argue it makes it much more likely. Risker (talk) 04:05, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Risker, go back and read his first sentence, please, he wrote, "If the problem is a banned user who is willing to create as many auto-confirmed socks as necessary to work on an article" (bolding mine). If a user is already banned, there is no further sanction available to us. We can't propose any more sanctions on someone we have already banned, and at this point, PC2 and semi are equal in letting socks throw in edits at will, just with the burden on PC2 of making someone review them. (The only protection option we have that fully stops the problem is full, but that carries its own problem. Lord knows I've spilled enough ink on why I think PC is bad for this project, but using it will never be holding the project hostage by a banned user.) Courcelles 04:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a "she", not a "he", but you got everything else right.

I specifically mentioned a banned user because I happened to have a particular instance in mind. There are several directions I can take this; the one that appeals to me the most at the moment is to make Risker my primary contact for dealing with the socks. MuZemike would probably appreciate the break. And if Risker can figure out how to protect the article (long-term semi'd at the moment, by way of slowing down the sockmaster) and get this user to stop it, then all the better. We've got the sock's real name and we know where she lives, by the way, so if all we need is someone to phone her and say "banned means banned, so stop editing forever, we really, really, really, really mean it this time or we're going to tell your parents to take away your computer", then perhaps Risker will decide to do that. Who knows, perhaps it will work better than the previous eighty or ninety on-wiki and e-mail efforts to stop her. Or perhaps Risker has another idea about how we could let the three editors who occasionally work on that article to keep working on it, without having to fetch an admin every time someone wants to add a sentence, without letting this sockmaster do the same. If so, I'm all ears. We could use the help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:47, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have no doubt that it can (and perhaps does) happen with semi and full protection. PC would make it easier for it to happen, especially if, as has been suggested by some, it is considered less restrictive and applied more liberally than page protection. Rivertorch (talk) 23:40, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't play "devil's advocate" and I'm not talking garbage, Fluffy; I'll respond privately if you like. I invited people to participate in the discussion at WT:PC2012, but we didn't get a broad enough sampling of opinions; thus this RfC. RfCs are useful for getting a quick sense of where the "votes" are and for increasing visibility and participation. They're lousy for everything else, including offense and defense. I'm delighted that people want to do the heavy lifting in committee work instead ... that's smart. In general, my plan there will be to look for alternatives that might deal with almost all the concerns on the table, from all sides. - Dank (push to talk) 00:40, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't say you were talking garbage, Dank. I did say that you were expressing a position that looked a lot like ABF, and since I know you to be a reasonable person someone who generally doesn't ABF (on second reading, my original "a reasonable person" was poorly phrased, since it sounds like I'm saying you're not behaving like a reasonable person, which is not at all what I intended it to say - sorry if it came off that way A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 05:01, 8 September 2012 (UTC)), I assumed you were playing devil's advocate. I apologize if you were serious. I do ask, however, that unless we have evidence that such activity happens or is likely to happen (or even if it's something a few people have indicated they'd like to happen!), we leave the predictions of evildoing at the side and keep the discussion on topic. That's not to say we can't or shouldn't discuss potential misuses of PC2, it's just saying that we ought to focus those discussions on issues that are, well, supported by evidence. "The software can't handle it", "PC2 disenfranchises people", "PC2 can be offputting to new users", etc are all valid objections, because we know those to be real possibilities or to have happened before. "People will organize in groups to misuse PC2 against their specific enemies on specific articles, and will break extremely clear rules to cause PC2 to be triggered on purpose" is, as far as I can tell, not something that happens with our current types of editing protections, and not something I've heard anyone refer to as a possibility (other than in this sort of "yes, but what IF??" commentary). If I'm wrong and there's evidence for this - if, for example, in your Wikimania interviews, you spoke to people who were like "Yeah, I'm totally looking forward to socking just to get PC2 put on an article, and then thumbing my nose at my enemies!" - then that's a different matter than just offering the possibility that someone could misuse editing controls in this apparently-novel way, and I'd love to hear what exactly was said along those lines, the better to understand it. Without any such indication, though, it's akin to saying "Also, if we put PC in place, Arbcom might go rogue and desysop everyone to keep them from using it! Or Willy on Wheels might become an admin and misuse it!" Like, yes, I suppose they could. But if there's been no indication that such a thing could or would happen, surely we have more immediate issues to discuss rather than coming up with novel ideas for how things would go wrong if a conspiracy or conspiracies of bad-faith users organized? A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 01:07, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Something to keep in mind is that there has *never* been community consensus on PC2; even in the most recent RFC, many who supported reinstating use of PC expressed concerns about PC2. The proposal that was approved for the trial had *only* administrators being permitted to make edits to pages on PC2, just as is the case with fully protected articles now. The software deployed for the trial (and still deployed, largely unchanged, today) is not what was approved by the community for creation or trial. Indeed, PC2 was specifically excluded from the trial. Risker (talk) 21:33, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The idea of having admins being the "Reviewers" for PC/2 makes sense to me. On the other hand, I know admins have backlogs of their own, and probably don't want the distraction. ~Adjwilley (talk) 03:35, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The issue as I see it here is not about pending changes, it is the workload on this project in total; namely we have tons of it, and fewer hands than we used to. Limiting work to a limited number of people is pretty much taking the risk that the group doesn't have the hours to devote to handling it. I think you'd need a balance; enough work that the sysops who looked at the queue would tend to find something, but not so much to overwhelm the two or three sysops who would check it regularly. (I'm ignoring the philosophical issues about limiting a task to admins, I'm sure we've all heard those arguments elsewhere without me repeating them.) Courcelles 04:01, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

More work with fewer hands sounds like pretty much the reason we should not be considering PC2. (In fact, it's one of the better arguments against PC entirely.) The analogy of PC2 is full protection, which at present permits only administrators to edit. Since I don't see any value in using PC2 (and nobody has illustrated any, either, for that matter), from my perspective it's moot who gets to do the edits. I do, however, see lots of reason to believe that Dank is probably right. Anyone who's spent much time at arbitration enforcement knows how this would work. Risker (talk) 04:09, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you, and said as much during the last RFC, the problem with this entire thing is manpower. Go stroll around ru.wp for a few clicks on the random article button. It isn't hard to find an article with several hundred edits pending review. That's the danger of this system here on en, if we get behind on this, it won't be one of our normal backlogs that we get to when and if we can, it'll drive away new editors who don't see any point in the system of their edits being gotten to sometime next year. Ru's admins and editors (analogous to en's reviewers) are dramatically overworked, we have to avoid that same fate to make this work, if it even can at all. Courcelles 04:54, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I could talk about ru.wp issues for hours, but I do not think they really belong to this thread. Whereas it is true that ru.wp editors are generally overworked and sometimes burn out, massive review backlogs are not an issue. It is true that an article with a large FR backlog is a common sight, and that some users review clearly vandal or inappropriate edits in order to set records and to get a barnstar, generally, this is not a problem: The same article without FR would be in exactly the same state, external readers normally do not see anything, and the presence of FR just helps to better distribute the reviewing (essentially, anti-vandal fighting) work between the editors, and an article where the lest version has been review has a chance to be reasonable.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:06, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Are there any objections to boxing up this page with the "Discussion" template on Tuesday morning if not much changes between now and then, per the vote at #Vote on closure, so that The Blade can get to work on a closing statement? We only have two opposes, and I'm about to ask DGG and Hut if there are any ground rules for the committee work (at WP:PC2012/Committee, if it happens) that would at least avoid the negatives they're seeing. I don't mind the apparent stalement (barring last-minute developments); for some reason, it's hard to get people to talk seriously about pros and cons of Pending Changes (PC) as long as they're hoping to "win" on sheer numbers. I hope this RfC has at least been useful for showing that we can't avoid the hard work of talking it out, especially since PC/2 has never been tested, trialed or even discussed much before now (and the software hasn't even been written yet). I've found that many supporters have deeper ideas about PC than are reflected in the rationales here, reflecting a variety of completely different problems that the community has been stalled on for years, and they're expecting or hoping for PC to be a useful first step. This makes the PC debates complicated, but I think it also suggests the way forward: keep asking questions until we figure out a way to give people what they really want. - Dank (push to talk) 18:54, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the best way forward would be to come up with some rules on what situations the tool can be used in and who gets to have the reviewer right, which we're going to have to do at some point if the tool is to be implemented. If these rules were sufficiently strict and liberal respectively then much of the opposition could be overcome. The problem is that we're going to debate these issues in the future anyway. I would be prepared to offer some input to the committee, even though I don't think its creation is the best thing to do right now. Hut 8.5 19:38, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't support putting PC2 to committee because I think PC2 is so contrary to the spirit of open editing that it isn't worth discussing. I can understand fluffenutter's assumption that Dank's argument was not meant meant seriously, because if it were meant seriously, it ought not have been--it is both dangerous and pointy to show something bad by deliberately attempting to misuse it.

Inserting: I must have done a terrible job with my argument. I tried to expand a bit for Fluffy earlier today; I hope that helps. - Dank (push to talk) 21:46, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I interpreted the suggestion of PC2 as a deliberate straw man, whose only justification would be in order to make it clear what we would not rationally want to do with PC. I am amazed and horrified to see it is even being seriously discussed. Were I a supporter of PC, I would not be so perverse as to try to complicate an already inherently confusing process by introducing it in two different forms, or deliberating proposing something the most likely to get opposition. As it is, I interpret the of PC2 as a warning that we need to be extremely careful not to let the protectors protect WP so thoroughly as to protect it from the possibility of further improvement by new editors.

Personally, I continue to oppose any form of PC whatsoever. I was asked at Wikimania by Dank to participate in the discussion nevertheless, essentially as a matter of damage limitation. I can understand the logic of it: if we must do it, let us do as little of it as possible. I am willing to do this. I understand Hut 8.5 to essentially be of the same opinion. We are prepared to do honest work on a modest form of protection--we might after all be wrong--it might possibly be useful and worth the cost. It might not be the disaster that the previous iteration of it was. But if the discussion turns to even the possibility of something like PC2, I can only take it as a warning that damage control may be impossible, and I need to reserve my energies towards the eventual total rejection of the whole idea. DGG ( talk ) 21:24, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not quite as opposed to PC2 as DGG is. I do think it could have a niche role as an alternative to full protection of articles. However that's a very small niche, and I am very alarmed at proposals to use it more generally on low-profile BLPs, of which we have many. I am opposed to use of pending changes more generally, and I do view this as something of a damage limitation exercise. Hut 8.5 22:16, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

While I more or less agree with many people that PC2 is a poor idea, the problem is that as long as the software is accessible, someone will use it. In fact, we already identified some administrators as using PC (generally speaking) even though the decision was that it was not to be used until December, and there were some fairly significant rows when administrators continued to use PC after the trial. So the next question is, if the agreement is that PC2 is not to be used, what will be the consequence of its use? Is this a remind-on-first-occasion, desysop-on-second-occasion situation? Risker (talk) 21:43, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding is that the software hasn't been written, right? Isn't the current version just a form of full protection? - Dank (push to talk) 21:47, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's the software, Dank; it's online right now on the protection interface. Any revisions to the software are a long way down the road and it is extremely unlikely to be available as of December 1. Risker (talk) 22:04, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Risker's right, as far as I know. The software is up and running, though it's only being used on a few pages (including the test pages a few of us have been playing around with). ~Adjwilley (talk) 22:52, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

All of this comment comes with a disclaimer that I am nowhere near understanding coding or Mediawiki deployment stuff, but: For the near-term (assuming that the scuttlebutt that the PC code must be entirely rewritten is true - I don't believe the devs have gotten around to officially confirming or denying that yet), I would actually prefer that the "not real"/zombie version of PC that's currently active be turned off entirely. It's apparently not what we'll be using, and its existence at the moment serves only to confuse people and run us into situations like Risker is describing. And if by some community agreement, we did put "Zombie PC" into real use instead of waiting for the new code, bad things would happen to the database and stuff, iirc, and we'd be forced to stop using it anyway. At the point where the new code is written and deployed, I would expect the code to reflect the community's will about something like "PC2 shall/shall not be used" - if the community doesn't want PC2, there ought to be a fairly simple way of preventing that as an option. I think. I mean, I'm not a programmer, but it seems like something that would be doable - some box dev-side to tick for which types of PC are available? A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 22:30, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To confirm, happy to ask for a shell to modify the userrights for enwiki so that only Bureaucrats have any of the PC-related user rights. (This way, if there are any pages still around when the shell throws the switch to 'disable' it, we still can rescue the pages from obscurity. ;-)) Would this be helpful? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Given the fact that there was outright refusal from the end of the trial on to disable PC, what's changed? (Not that I would have any problem with disabling the current software; I was pushing for it eons ago.) And why bureaucrats? As a sidenote, it should be no trouble at all to remove PC from the few pages that currently have it, so probably nobody needs related permissions. We'd need to review all the protection interfaces to remove the option for those who won't have it, as well as the reviewer interfaces... Risker (talk) 23:57, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Just to come back to the question in the title, PC is a sysop tool with potential for misuse so it needs to be kept on a tight rein, with the community ensuring that it's used only in accordance with the consensus. We're going to need a PC review process (analagous to our current block review and deletion review processes). I'm guessing PC review will take place on AN/I, at least unless and until we decide to spin it out onto a separate page like DRV.

  This being Wikipedia, it'll be practically impossible to hold our sysops to account for a bad decision concerning PC. As with bad blocks and bad deletions, and indeed with other kinds of misbehaviour, there'll be persistent repeat offenders among the sysops, and nothing will be done about them. Wikipedia's needed an effective mechanism for general-purpose supervision and scrutiny of sysops for a very long time indeed.—S Marshall T/C 00:16, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If the underlying policy is sufficiently clear, Arbcom has shown an increasing willingness to desysop when admins ignore it. The issue is that most guidance for admins provides considerable discretion, so there are rarely clear cut cases. For instance, if we said that the ONLY time PC/2 can be applied is per a close at AN or AN/I, I think it would be very enforceable. If instead we just leave it to admin discretion in certain types of cases, we can't really complain when admins use the discretion we grant them. Monty₈₄₅ 01:02, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think that we start with the assumption that PC (both Level 1 and Level 2) are forms of page protection. If someone screws up and implements PC1 or PC2 against consensus (either deliberately or accidentally), then we treat it exactly like someone screwing up and implementing FULL or SEMI against consensus. I believe the usual solution there is to ask the admin nicely to clean up his mess, and to proceed to WP:RFPP or similar forum to determine the consensus if necessary.

I don't think it's fair to threaten de-sysopping for two errors. Given that Risker says above that the default/no consensus outcome from this RFC ("no consensus" seems likely to me) will be that PC2 is available for use, I also don't believe that 100% of uses should be considered errors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:08, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• It strikes me that one possible answer is to implement a forum for users to gain consensus for implementing PC on a page. We might create a list of situations where it's clear-cut that PC can be introduced instantly—like CSD—and a page where we can have seven-day discussions about less clear-cut situations. WP:RFPC might become a bluelink.—S Marshall T/C 07:52, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Like this? Rivertorch (talk) 10:26, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, similar, except that there would be a way to short-circuit the discussion for clear-cut and obvious cases.—S Marshall T/C 10:46, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Or we could just send it through RFPP, which doesn't take a week but which can be discussed as much or as little as needed, and which is used to handling both "upgrades" and "downgrades" (via the RFUP section) in protection levels. Then we aren't increasing and fragmenting the bureaucracy or delaying solutions that might be needed immediately (e.g., vandalism to an article whose subject is in the news this week). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:11, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse me ... "the default/no consensus outcome from this RFC ("no consensus" seems likely to me) will be that PC2 is available for use"? We have a unanimous vote against that interpretation at #Vote on closure: 11 say that we won't be finished here until a committee develops a third option that a lot of people can support, and for the other two, "no consensus, therefore PC2 is available" is the opposite of what they're asking for. Does anyone see it different? We've had no objection to my suggestion to box up this page with the "Discussion" template on Tuesday morning so that discussion can move to the next phase. - Dank (push to talk) 12:05, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Well, Dank, the situation is that we had a RFC in May. The pre-appointed (!) closers of that RFC decided, in their wisdom, that Pending Changes would go live on 1 December. They also decided that it will go live according to the wonderful and lovely "draft policy", unless we achieve consensus to vary that draft policy before 1 November. (Joyously, the option to "improve it first" was Verboten, as indeed were any other positions except the Official Three, so the Draft Policy was always and inevitably going to become Official Policy.)

  What this means, of course, is that the gorgeous "draft policy" will be implemented exactly as written, and that means that PC2 will be available for use without any guidance. Which means in accordance with the whims and prejudices of the individual sysop, unless we can find a way to overrule that RfC close. (Please can we?)—S Marshall T/C 13:26, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • Okay, but do you see any other way to interpret the 11-2 vote at #Vote on closure? - Dank (push to talk) 13:43, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm with Risker. I think that vote means we haven't decided either way yet, so unless we can reach consensus on PC2 by 1 November, the draft policy is still on target to be implemented.—S Marshall T/C 14:12, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • Okay, I can live with that, and if that's what Risker's saying, I can live with that too. Maybe I was misreading it, but that's not what the quote I started with sounded like. - Dank (push to talk) 14:50, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        • Of course, I might have misunderstood her.  :-)—S Marshall T/C 15:12, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • That's not quite how I read it. I raised the same question at the talk page, and my impression is that this RfC indicates there is not consensus to implement PC2 per the draft policy. Rivertorch (talk) 15:52, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • If I may make a suggestion, I've seen this film and I know how it ends ... "What, you think you won when you don't even have a majority?" ... so let's move on to the next featured attraction, which (according to the 11-2 vote) is where people are headed anyway. We can't really get started for two more days, of course, but if anyone wants to critique my two ground rules or add some of your own, be my guest. - Dank (push to talk) 16:00, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

      Rivertorch, if you're going by a straight-up vote, it's 58% in favor of using PC2 (not counting the !votes that say they oppose it, except maybe later, or maybe under a particular rule). We may not have an actual consensus, but we certainly do not have a consensus to prohibit PC2 or to change the draft policy (although, if the committee comes up with some good ideas, I'm hopeful that we will form a positive consensus for some changes related to PC2 in the future). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:17, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

      @ Dank: I have every intention of "committing" myself in two days, although I still think we're asking the questions in the wrong order. Speaking of films and uneven numbers, btw, consider this one (and its predecessor). If I hadn't been familiar with the play, I might have been surprised at how it ended. (Not that this is a battleground in any sense of the word, of course.) @ WhatamIdoing: I have never gone by a straight-up vote. I don't believe in 'em, at least when it comes to Wikipedia RfCs. Rivertorch (talk) 08:17, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Current methods of protection also have editors wait for their edits to be approved. Do you oppose current methods of protection also? Mysterytrey 23:05, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I know how PC/2 is intended to work, and I'm comfortable with the community, so I wouldn't mind editing a PC/2-protected page. The problem is that people who aren't familiar or comfortable with the community (including many of our hardest-working editors) largely don't agree; they would prefer that no one be able to edit a page (outside of the occasionally granted edit request), rather than having to get their edits approved. Ask them. You're talking about PC/2 as a substitute for full protection here ... so assuming for a moment that PC/2 is limited to that role, the real shame would be that we're talking about very few article-space pages at any given moment, so any advantage would be very small, but the cost in making non-Metapedian Wikipedians, and non-Wikipedians, nervous that a new class of editors has been elevated above them could potentially be high. (This is meant only as a rebuttal to this particular argument ... I understand that people like WhatamIdoing and Joe Decker need better tools than they currently have, whether something like PC/2 or something else.) - Dank (push to talk) 02:21, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Dank, can you tell me whether you oppose PC2 because you personally dislike it, or whether you personally don't oppose it, but you're opposing it here on behalf of some unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators? I kind of hope in these discussions that people are speaking just for themselves, without worrying whether our guesses about non-participants' views are being adequately represented. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:47, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The alternative to citing Foundation research (which reminds me, I forgot to cite Steven Walling and Maryana's research ... it's mentioned at WT:PC2012) and repeating what people have told me, of course, is to invite them to the RfC, rather than pitching the RfC in the Signpost and at WP:CENT, which probably slanted heavily toward Metapedians. I could have tried to get a watchlist notice, or put notices on user talk pages and wikiproject pages. I didn't do that because it would have been successful, in the sense of pulling in people who are skeptical of Metapedians, which would have given us a big fight with more heat than light ... but also would have shown us something closer to the true numbers, which I'm pretty sure are not in PC/2's favor. We Metapedians have our flaws, but at least we have some cohesion and sense of pulling in the same direction, which makes RfCs more productive. I was hoping that Metapedians would realize that just because non-Metapedians aren't voting doesn't mean they aren't editing, so nothing will be gained by being insensitive to their viewpoints. I'm still hoping. - Dank (push to talk) 00:19, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If the proposal was to eliminate full-protection and use PC2 instead, it might make sense. Whether it would be superior would still need to be discussed. Whether it would be superior enough to be worth changing would need to be discussed. But to use it as an additional method is to create confusion, and for a need nobody has actually been able to demonstrate--and I think it would take really critical need to be worth the confusion.

Actually, i think just the same for PC1, that it would only be of potential value if it replaced semi-protection, not supplemented it. And I would again feel that even so, the change isn't worth the confusion.

The difference is that PC1 would at least have a frequent enough use that people will more easily become familiar with it But my basic position is that all of this is going in exactly the wrong direction. WP is already too complicated, and we are trying to deal with its faults by making it more complicated yet. What we need to do is to try to figure out not what user privileges we might want to add, but what ones we can do without. Not what additional processes we need, but which we can remove. Not what new features we should add, but first what old ones we should eliminate. DGG ( talk ) 05:14, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

@EngineerFromVega, @Wctaiwan: would you prefer higher standards for reviewers, and would you prefer that the community have a say in reviewership? Although the latter is not as likely, this and related RfCs would be a good place to suggest such, and perhaps you should consider amending your supports to include that, to get a more accurate say as to who also has such an opinion. --Mysterytrey 23:33, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Did you mean their opposes? - Dank (push to talk) 00:13, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wctaiwan's talk page, EngineerFromVega's concerns raised somewhere on this page.

No. I think PC/2 should not be implemented. Having higher standards for reviewers wouldn't necessarily fix things (e.g. there are people who are very good at protecting BLPs, but who I would not trust to use the tool with sufficient discretion), and having the community decide who gets the permissions makes it more complicated and gives the reviewers artificial "power". All this is aside from my opinion that the system favours a reviewer's views on content over a non-reviewer's, despite both probably being good-faith contributors (as in, not blocked before they were autoconfirmed). wctaiwan (talk) 01:24, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

@Tijfo098: it took 40 minutes after each edit to be reviewed, according to the page log. Otherwise, if it had not been PC2d, given it was protected because of editwarring, I think it would have been fully-protected, where edit requests would be required to be made, which I consider significantly more clicked than just clicking approve. --Mysterytrey 00:23, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What edit warring? You meant stuff like this. Vandalism by IPs? Happens all the time and semi-protection requests for stuff like that get rejected. I can give you diffs for that too, and those cases involve more than on IP. So one-day vandalism by one IP (who got blocked) justifies allowing only admins to approve edits, for many months? Never mind admins adding a stack of orange boxes to the article one of which says "this academic is non notable" and which stayed in place for months. Good luck with your 'pedia. Tijfo098 (talk) 09:56, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As I've pointed out in the oppose section above, the major difference between full-protection and PC2 is that PC2 empowers the reviewers to approve/disapprove an edit, while full-protection requires the right-holders (Admins) to get a consensus on the related talk pages for their edits (except for minor ones). In other words, full-protection doesn't give any content related powers to the admins, but PC2 provides the reviewers with complete authority to judge an edit.

I'd be happy to support PC2 if the reviewers are required to get a consensus for each of their actions on the related talk pages, just like Admins are supposed to do on fully-protected pages. However, this approach is impractical, in my opinion. EngineerFromVega^★ 06:52, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Why do you think it is impractical? --Mysterytrey 22:27, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Mostly, requiring the reviewers to get a consensus for each review will bog down the talk pages. EngineerFromVega^★ 06:31, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As you said, admins need consensus for major changes. What would be different about having reviewers get consensus on talk pages, as would also happen in full-protected pages. --Mysterytrey 23:29, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• PC2 is already God's gift to page owners as it is; we certainly don't need that!—S Marshall T/C 15:27, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• While it's true that what WhatamIdoing calls "guesses about non-participants' views" probably shouldn't determine the outcome of any RfC, I think Dank is onto something here. There are a lot of editors for who never participate in—and may not even be aware of—RfCs on policy matters, and such editors may be among the most productive article-builders we have. I'm struck by the fact that in combing through my watchlist, I frequently encounter highly constructive, sometimes excellent, changes from editors whose user names are totally unfamiliar to me, yet when I mouseover them I find they've been here for years, have thousands of edits under their belts, and often enough have no user rights beyond autoconfirmed status. Of course, each of them is an individual, and it may be useless to speculate about how they might collectively react to suddenly find their edits on a given article are subject to approval by a subset of Wikipedians they may never have heard of. Still, I can well imagine quite a few of them quietly drifting away from the project as a result, and that would be a huge loss. We spend a lot of time worrying about cultivating and retaining new editors, and that's all well and good, but trying very hard not to alienate established, low-profile editors is something we should think about too, not just in general terms but specifically in considering the fate of PC2. Rivertorch (talk) 21:07, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We've had one ongoing vote on closure, almost since the beginning, and mentioned in the RfC instructions, at #Vote on closure, that indicates that it's past time for this RfC to be closed, but DGG is requesting that we open a new section with a second vote on closure. I'm not taking any position on whether this is advisable or necessary, simply trying to get everyone on board. Feel free to offer any votes or comments you like. Presumably, people (such as me) who already have an active support or oppose at #Vote on closure don't need to repeat themselves. - Dank (push to talk) 21:27, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm confused. We have a vote for what to do after closure already going, but we have to open a second one because...DGG doesn't like the existing one? What's the logic here that I'm missing? (As a side note, I don't much care when the RfC is closed. I'm much more concerned with what the result is, as far as bridges that can be built between the two positions) A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 21:52, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm confused too, but DGG is about as clueful as they come, and he does make a good point that, recently, people have stopped voting at #Vote on closure ... I suppose it wouldn't hurt to put out a "last call". But I'm not inclined to give this more than a couple of days, at most. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm ready to start reading proposals of any kind at WT:PC2012/Committee. - Dank (push to talk) 21:56, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • P.S. I'll go ask The Blade if he's okay with this. - Dank (push to talk) 22:35, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• I think this vote is kind of a moot point, since no one can stop any group of people from discussing proposals, and whether or not there is a new "Committee" page upon which to discuss matters rather than the existing WT:PC2012 page, it won't change the substance of the discussion. In any case, I assume after all of the opinion-gathering RfCs are done, groups of interested parties will use the input to generate strawmen proposals, and they will be discussed and further refined. isaacl (talk) 23:02, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• I never actually understood the need for an early close, for the first vote for closure and the second. --Mysterytrey 23:18, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• My view hasn't changed since last week.—S Marshall T/C 12:26, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• If people want this closed up, I'll get around to it tonight; I think I pretty much know what I see, I just need to get a good statement written. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:13, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes please. Yaris678 (talk) 17:47, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Ditto ~Adjwilley (talk) 18:51, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]