[Foundation-l] Pending Changes

Tue Sep 28 22:37:53 UTC 2010

Decisions at Wikipedia are not based a vote.  The majority support
Pending Changes and insufficient reasons have been put forwards by
those who wish to see it quashed. I would like to thank Erik Moeller
for the difficult discussion he has made. It is impossible to make
everyone happy sometimes.

I support PC for a number of reasons including.

1) Concerns are voiced both by academia and our readership regarding
Wikipedia's reliability. Pending changes addresses some of these
concerns. Thus there is a good chance that "pending changes" will not
only increase our readership but the number of people who edit. No one
wants to put in the work to create something good or excellent just to
have it vandalized and left un-repaired.

2) Vandals like to see their work go "live". Pending changes stops
this and will thus potentially decrease the entire volume of
vandalism.  Most vandals will not be willing to pit in the effort to
get around these measures.

3) We will have a tool to allow the world to seamlessly contribute to
a greater part of Wikipedia. Instead of semi protecting some pages (
and thus making it difficult for IPs to contribution ) we can use PC
to make Wikipedia more open per our founding principles.

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.