*Nutshell: The big, blue button will soon say "Publish page" instead of
"Save page", because when you click it, the contents get published on the
internet.*
I apologize for cross-posting this to the GLAM and Education lists:
A long-requested change to the "Save" button may finally happen towards the
end of March. This is a button that anyone leading a workshop about
editing is going to talk about, so I wanted to make sure that you didn't
get surprised by this change.
Last year, the WMF looked into an old request to clarify the language on
the "Save" button, which confuses some new contributors. The main problem
is that it is unclear whether "Save" means "save a private copy" (as
it
does on most websites these days) or "irrevocably post this to the
internet". This confusion apparently explains a few unwanted behaviors,
such as editors who save the page ("just to be safe") before previewing
their changes.
There are some other reasons behind to do this: It creates some
inconsistency in the interface, as some things (e.g., Special:Preferences)
get saved but kept private, while other things (e.g., normal wiki pages)
get saved and immediately published. It is also difficult to translate the
label into some languages, as the word has multiple possible translations
in some languages.
The plan, therefore, is to change "Save" to "Publish". Instead of the
big
blue[1] button saying "Save page" (for a new page) or "Save changes"
(when
you edit an existing page), the button will instead say "Publish page" or
"Publish changes".
The upside to this small change is that new contributors will understand
that all of their edits go to the public immediately.[2] The downside is
that all of the documentation and help pages is going to be out of date.
This plan was announced on the wikis last August, and is tentatively
scheduled for sometime in March. I hope that this extra note will keep you
from getting surprised in front of a group and give you enough time to
update any handouts that you might be using in the future.
Relevant links:
-
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131132 – main task (best place to
figure out if this gets postponed again)
- Special:Translations&message=Publishpage
<https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translations&namespace=8&message=Publishpage>
(translation
status)
- Special:Translations&message=Publishchanges
<https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translations&namespace=8&message=Publishchanges>
(translation
status)
[1] The color of this button in all of the older wikitext editors will be
changing this week. It's going to be big and blue.
[2] This is true even when the wiki is using FlaggedRevisions or
PendingChanges, because the un-accepted changes can be seen by the general
public from the history page or from &oldid URLs, regardless of whether the
revision has been accepted.
--
Sherry Snyder (WhatamIdoing)
Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation