RfC: The future of pending changes edit
Background edit
Pending changes has been discussed recently in this RfC and this RfC. FlaggedRevs (the extension that implements 'pending changes') is technically unmaintained and unstable.
The extension has no maintainer; it is ancient and technically complex. There are few people still around that are familiar with the codebase, and most devs don't want to touch it. To quote a developer:
This extension has been deployed to prod around seven years ago and after a while it became virtually without any maintainer, Technical debt in this code is unimaginable and in matter of UX/UI it's non-standard and out-dated but any (of my) attempts to to modernize it failed due to out-of-date and non-standard php code.
— T185664: Code stewardship review: FlaggedRevs
T233561, T234743 and T256296 are still open, and various random bugs keep cropping up.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] The fix for one bug frequently causes another inexplicable bug.
Presumably due to its instability, the WMF has maintained (since 2017) a policy of not permitting its deployment on new wikis.
T185664 (since 2018) discusses the long-term future of the extension but the code stewardship review is stalled since no WMF team wishes to take responsibility for the extension. When I spoke to some devs about it last year, they said they lost faith in the code stewardship review process, and guessed that the eventuality for the extension would be (WMF-mandated, global) undeployment. As of a few months ago, a volunteer is trying to axe code and functionality from it to make it more maintainable, however there still does not seem to be WMF interest to maintain it. Sometimes upstream fixes for regressions do not happen or take a while; recently the software stopped autoreviewing revisions and we had to create and approve an enwiki bot to work around the bug locally.
Statistically, 4138 pages are protected with pending changes protection.
In light of these constant issues and poor prospects for future maintenance, this RfC is started to ascertain the community's position on the continued use of pending changes on enwiki.
Question 1: User-right to review pending changes edit
Should the pending changes user right be removed and the ability to review revisions added to either autoconfirmed or extendedconfirmed?
(my cmt: Even if the extension is kept, the pending changes user right doesn't make sense to me. PC is supposedly considered a 'less restrictive alternative' to semi-protection. Really the only difference is semi-protection requires you to make a request on talk, and PC lets you use the editing interface and submit the request that way. But any autoconfirmed editor (10 edits, 4 days registered) can implement a semi-protected edit request. It doesn't make sense to restrict the approval of pending changes to a special user-right that users have to apply for. Technically, this will presumably also prevent regressions like T275322.)
Question 2: Deprecate future use of pending changes edit
Should the protection policy be amended to deprecate the use of pending changes for future protections? Pages currently protected with pending changes protection will be allowed to keep using it, although admins are encouraged to switch a page to an alternate form of protection on request.
Question 3: Undeploy pending changes edit
Should the pending changes extension be undeployed from the English Wikipedia? All existing pending changes protections will be moved to semiprotection or unprotected, as appropriate. The user-right will also be removed.