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.)
I haven't the slighest idea how this wound up in mobile and apps, and I don't appear to have page move permissions on meta. Would someone move it over to Editing, please? 3mi1y (talk) 02:42, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Logically if we were going to code a way to make this voluntary, we should have it as something we can place on a user, so communities can consider it as an alternative to TBANs in certain cases. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:36, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I like this idea conceptually, but how would it work practically? "Topic" in the broad sense meant by a TBAN isn't really a thing the software knows about. The closest approximation I can think of is categories. 3mi1y (talk) 09:00, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The key thing to understand about the Pending Changes system is that essentially it lets you manage a "last reliable revision" pointer within the page history. All edits made to a page that has any pending edits will themselves become pending, regardless of who made them. So between the time the pending edit is made and the time it is reiewed, the page is effectively "frozen" for all anonymous readers. That makes the labeling of changes as pending (voluntarily or otherwise) very disruptive, and also opens up all kinds of trolling opportunities (e.g. make a controverisal change to some page that's in the news cycle, then make a good but hard-to-review pending edit to it). --Tgr (talk) 00:34, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This one reminds me of phab:T113004. Which would be a lot of work. And anyway, getting these people to opt in to a selection probably isn't going to work from the UX side (who hits the minor edit button still? :). I'm not sure what the solution would look like but I tend toward Nosebagbear above that it should be something that communities place on individuals rather than a voluntary selection. Izno (talk) 07:23, 13 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support. It would encourage new users to make their first edit when they fear that they would break up something. --魔琴 (talk) 08:42, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support The actual style of use will need some thinking by the community tech team, but the difficulties with handling COI requested edits on a practical timescale encourages violations of the rules by people who would otherwise comply. This could offer an option there, as well as a less-punitive sanction possibility in other areas. Nosebagbear (talk) 17:49, 13 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support This could be very useful. My support is conditioned on this being sufficiently easy to implement -- if it's a large change, all bets are off. CRGreathouse (talk) 19:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Done SWilson (WMF) (talk) 02:56, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Support Tom Ja (talk) 21:05, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Strong support This is sorely needed. PureTuber (talk) 21:41, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
