Wikipedia:Pending changes/Evaluation

Goal of 'pending changes'

To improve the quality of wikipedia articles by making vandalism/unverified information/”bad” edits more difficult, some pages in EN wiki have various levels of protection status. These protected and semiprotected pages (ostensibly) have fewer “bad” edits that surface, but suffer from the problem that potentially “good” edits by anonymous users don't get in. 'Pending changes' would be a way to allow anonymous edits but queue them for moderation before they show up in an article.

Concerns of 'pending changes'

'Pending changes' takes away the 'instant gratification' that users get of seeing their edits immediately published and publicly viewable. DE wiki, which has taken the extreme approach of making all their pages use flagged revs, has seen a marked decrease in participation, although the quality of their content is very high.

Evaluation

In general, the goal of 'pending changes' is to let through more “good” edits than semiprotected pages have, while having less “bad” edits make it to the public. There's no objective way of measuring a “good” or “bad” edit, but for the purposes of this project we'll say a “bad” edit is approximately an edit that gets reverted, and a “good” edit is approximately one that does not.

Metrics

The following should be measured:

• increased server loads/processing time for the system
• “good” edit vs “bad” edit rates on high-traffic pages
• “good” edit vs “bad” edit rates on semi-protected pages
• “good” edit vs “bad” edit rates on 'pending changes' pages both before and after the 'pending changes' system was used