Oddly enough I am truly agnostic on this particular bit of software It s always been my position that it should have a fair trial but it seems that at every step things have been problematic First off there was the fact it was introduced immediately on the heels of two other major UI changes the addition of revision deletion to the admin toolkit and the switchover to Vector Then there was the fact that the version on the test wiki was not the version to be introduced here so nobody could even test it properly on the testwiki The trial criteria were not developed until just days before the trial itself and there were no benchmarks set to determine whether or not there was any change over time or whether that change was positive or negative The majority of early supporters in the original PC poll wanted it to be focused on BLPs but for some reason at the end of the poll it was decided that PC should be applied to currently protected or semi protected articles instead and those were the articles targeted in the trial The WMF press on the subject specifically referred to the ability for anonymous and newly registered users to edit long time semi protected articles of high profile topics the George W Bush article was specifically mentioned without discussing this in advance with the community It lasted less than 2 days on pending changes with mountains of vandalism during that period Then there was the promise by the lead developer that PC would be shut off at the end of 60 days unless the community clearly requested otherwise Four days later when lead developer responsibility changed hands the new lead developer announced that he would rather keep things running during any review on a quiet page with only the most interested editors watching Even with all of this disarray I still hoped that we could get a reasonable trial of the tool It was agreed that we d start off with 2000 articles in the trial starting with just a few and ramping up so that we d hit the 2 K articles around 2 weeks into the trial with the expectation that if things went well we d add more incrementally perhaps up to 10 K however only a handful of administrators participated in adding articles to the trial and I don t think we ever got above 1500 Further at that point we d pretty well added all of the articles that were eligible under the criteria for the trial except for ones in categories where one or more administrator had objected to inclusion as best I can tell their objections were based on the articles being honey pots for socks I was one of the most active admins in adding articles to the trial and I confess I sneaked in a pile of BLPs that technically didn t meet the criteria they had been semi protected in the previous 6 months and had fewer than 10 watchers Indeed one of the most telling factors on this trial was the fact that very very few administrators appeared to be interested in using the tool as currently configured I also note that the time that it has taken edits to be reviewed has continued to lengthen as time has gone on A few weeks ago I led a panel on the topic of Pending changes at the New York City Wiki conference Thanks to DGG Becksguy and Jamesofur who were also on the panel That same day keynote speaker Clay Shirky talked about the fact that once a culture is broken it is not able to rebound back to its prior state In my own closing statement I reflected on that comment and wondered if pending changes might be the culture breaker for Wikipedia and if it was whether or not that would be a good or bad thing Certainly the manner in which this entire trial has proceeded has shown that there are some pretty huge differences in what people perceive as the way we do things around here I don t think the pending changes software or its use will be the culture breaker but the manner in which it is being integrated and promoted into the project might very well be I am very considerably concerned that this pressure to keep a bit of trial software running has resulted in a level of divisiveness between good faith Wikipedians from which the community may not recover