Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Voluntary pending changes/Proposal
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- Problem: On enwiki, we have a months-long backlog of COI edit requests. I don't really look at them anymore, because (of those that would be acceptable) many of them are frustratingly vague but not quite decline-worthy, many of them are incredibly long multi-part requests, and for the rest the process is frustratingly manual: copy the proposed text, go find the place in the article where it should be, make the edit, go copy the requester's username, write an edit summary attributing it to them, save, go back to the talk page, and mark the request as done (for which you can't even use the reply button because you need to also flip the 'answered' bit in the original request template). Many requests are declined with the {{ECOI|xy}} template ("Not done for now: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format.").
- I've dealt with a few COI editors who noticed how big this backlog was and were hesitant to submit totally reasonable changes. I assume some large percentage of them are fully discouraged, and either don't submit their request or just disregard the policy and edit the page anyway.
- Proposed solution: Allow editors to mark their own edits as needing review, in a similar manner to how Pending Changes works. This is like minor edits but in the other direction, and could be presented in the same way.
- This forces the submitter to specify exactly what edit they want made, gives us correct attribution automatically (because the edit was submitted by the author, not the reviewer), and gives the reviewer a diff to easily review the change in context.
- Who would benefit: Editors who submit COI edit requests, and those involved in responding to them. (I think the encyclopedia can benefit from well-behaved COI editors, because those are often the people most willing to put in the effort to keep an article up to date. The current process does not encourage them to be well-behaved.)
- Secondarily, I've occasionally found myself considering fixing what looks like an error in an article, but not confident enough in my own understanding of the subject to be sure I'm not introducing an error. I can see occasional non-COI uses for an "I think this is right, but someone who knows more should verify this" checkbox, in a code review sort of way. Currently, the best we have is to post on the talk page and hope someone sees it within the next 6 months.
- More comments: I leave it open to discussion who should be able to review the edits. The existing pending changes reviewers seem like a reasonable choice, as do any of the *confirmed groups. (This is probably per-wiki configuration anyway.)
- Phabricator tickets:
- Proposer: 3mi1y (talk) 02:40, 25 January 2023 (UTC)