Wikipedia:PC2012/Adjwilley

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This page in a nutshell: This is a modified version of the provisional policy that was voted upon during the 2012 Pending changes RfC. The main difference is that in this version, pending changes "go live" after a specified time period (ex. 24 hours) or after they are accepted by a reviewer, whichever comes first.

Provisional policy

Pending changes

Pending-changes protection (PC protection) is useful for mitigating the damage caused by inappropriate and disruptive editing, while allowing good faith users to submit edits.

Edits to articles with pending changes protection will "go live" automatically after a specified time period or after they have been approved by a reviewer (whichever comes first). The time period is a parameter that will be chosen by the administrator who protects the article. The time might range from a few hours to several days, depending on the article, but a period of 24 hours is recommended. Shorter time periods may be used for articles that have a high edit rate and a lot of watchers. Longer time periods may be used for articles with few watchers.

Before going live, pending changes will be visible to logged-in users, and in the edit history of the article. Anonymous users editing a protected article should receive a simple but clear edit notice telling them how long it will be before their edit goes live.

Reviewers

Reviewers are users with a similar level of trust to rollbackers, and the reviewer right can be granted and removed by any administrator or upon request at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions. Potential reviewers should be able to recognize vandalism, be familiar with basic content policies such as the policy on living people, have a reasonable level of experience editing Wikipedia, and read the guide to reviewing.

A reviewer may accept pending changes in a number of ways. The reviewer may accept or reject using a queue of changes awaiting review. If the reviewer rejects the pending changes, this will show up as a revert in the article's history. Alternatively, if a reviewer makes an edit to an article with pending changes, they will be prompted to review and accept any preceding pending changes before saving. If pending changes are reverted by others before being reviewed, the article will simply remain in its original state. In all cases, however, the reverted edit will still be available in the article's history.

Implementation

Pending changes should be used on pages where the disruption to good-faith editing caused by existing protection tools would be disproportionate to the problem the protection seeks to resolve. It can be set to hold back edits by IP/non-autoconfirmed users (level 1) or by all non-reviewers (level 2). Suitable issues for pending changes protection include persistent:

Vandalism;
Re-insertion of rumor, error, and NPOV/V/OR violations;
Edit warring by large groups of unregistered users;
Disruption by users on highly variable IPs.

These standards are to be interpreted more liberally on biographies of living persons, or in any situation involving content related to living persons. As with other forms of protection, PC should not be used preemptively, and requests for protection should be submitted at WP:RPP.

As with other forms of protection, the time frame of the protection should be proportional to the problem. Indefinite PC protection should only be used in cases of severe long-term disruption. Level-2 protection should only be used in cases where full protection would usually be appropriate, for example on articles persistently targeted by sockpuppeteers with autoconfirmed accounts. Like semi-protection, pending changes should never be used in genuine content disputes, where there is a risk of placing a particular group of editors at a disadvantage.
Administrators should try to keep the number of pending-changes-protected pages to a level that is manageable by the active reviewers. As a rule of thumb, if edits are frequently waiting longer than an hour to be reviewed administrators should not apply PC protection to new pages and should instead look to reduce the number of pages under this type of protection.

Pending changes table

Old version

Wikipedia users, page protections, and page edits
	Unregistered, New	Autoconfirmed, Confirmed	Reviewer	Administrator
No protection	can edit; visible immediately; no acceptance required
Pending-changes level 1 protection	can edit; changes need acceptance to be visible; cannot accept	can edit; visible immediately*; cannot accept	can edit; visible immediately*; can accept
Pending-changes level 2 protection	can edit; changes need acceptance to be visible; cannot accept		can edit; visible immediately*; can accept
Semi-protection	cannot edit	can edit; visible immediately; no acceptance required
Pending-changes level 2 with Semi-protection	cannot edit	can edit; changes need acceptance to be visible; cannot accept	can edit; visible immediately*; can accept
Full protection	cannot edit			can edit; visible immediately*; no acceptance required
*These changes are visible immediately if no previous pending changes remain to be accepted.

Proposed version

Wikipedia users, page protections, and page edits
	Unregistered, New	Autoconfirmed, Confirmed	Reviewer	Administrator	Appropriate for
No protection	can edit; changes go live immediately (no acceptance required)				The vast majority of articles
Pending-changes level 1 protection	can edit; changes will go live after a specified time period or after being accepted by a reviewer;	can edit; changes go live immediately (if no previous pending changes remain to be accepted)	can edit; changes go live immediately*; can accept pending changes		Articles that are borderline for semi-protection. Not recommended for articles with a very high edit rate
Semi-protection	cannot edit	can edit; changes go live immediately; no acceptance required			Articles experiencing high levels of vandalism or edit warring from unregistered and new users
Pending-changes level 2 protection	can edit; changes will go live after a specified time period or after being accepted by a reviewer;		can edit; changes go live immediately*; can accept pending changes		Articles that experience high levels of vandalism or edit warring from (auto)confirmed accounts such as some controversial BLP articles. Not recommended for articles with a very high edit rate
Pending-changes level 2 with Semi-protection	cannot edit	can edit; changes will go live after a specified time period or after being accepted by a reviewer;	can edit; changes go live immediately*; can accept pending changes		Articles that experience high levels of vandalism from (auto)confirmed accounts such that they are borderline for full protection.
Full protection	cannot edit			can edit; changes go live immediately	Articles experiencing persistent vandalism or edit warring from (auto)confirmed accounts and for important templates
*When editing articles with un-reviewed pending changes, Administrators and Reviewers are prompted to review the pending changes before saving their edit.