Thanks, Nick! I will pass on the news!
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Nick Wilson (Quiddity)
Sent: Tuesday, 18 August 2015 8:47 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Visual Editor experiment might have a problem ...
Hi Kerry,
IIUC, the original bug was
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109113 ("Can't
successfully complete a second CAPTCHA in VisualEditor's save dialog") which
started last Thursday, and was fixed this morning (and the fix should now already be
deployed to the production wikis). It was only an issue if the first CAPTCHA attempt
failed (but I know how common that can be!). Sorry it affected your training session. :(
I see that Whatamidoing already replied to your post at WP:VEF
Quiddity
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Sam Katz <smkatz(a)gmail.com
<mailto:smkatz@gmail.com> > wrote:
No, you don't need CAPTCHA. You can use Honeypot. I think that would fix it.
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Jonathan Morgan <jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org
<mailto:jmorgan@wikimedia.org> > wrote:
No, I'm not aware of any ongoing CAPTCHA work. There was a long thread on wikitech-l
starting last December ("Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly") that resulted in some
Phabricator tasks and a wikipage. But I don't know of any active development plans.
By the way: Aaron's in transition (of the timezone variety) right now, so it may be a
day or so before he's able to respond to this thread.
- J
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:53 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com
<mailto:wiki.pine@gmail.com> > wrote:
I thought that someone was already working on CAPTCHA improvents, but I can't remember
who, and I haven't heard anything recently which makes me wonder if this was
de-prioritized.
J-mo, do you happen to know the status of the CAPTCHA work is, and who, if anyone, is
active on that project?
Pine
On Aug 16, 2015 10:41 PM, "WereSpielChequers" <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com
<mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote:
Hi Kerry,
there is an experiment going on that randomly opts half if new users into V/E and leaves
half using the classic editor. That should account for why one of your newbies had been
opted in but not the other.
Captcha when adding citations is a longstanding problem, we need Captcha on account
creation to keep the spam bots at bay, but somehow it also applies to newbies adding
external links as cites, so we have a software feature that doesn't effect the vandals
but instead targets the best of our newbies. My suspicion is that if we could work out
when that was introduced and then compare it to subsequent recruitment and retention we
would find that this was one of the most damaging mistakes we've made.
Regards
Jonathan
On 17 Aug 2015, at 04:56, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com
<mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com> > wrote:
I ran my first training session using the Visual Editor this morning and hit what appeared
to be a show-shopping bug. It appeared that the two new users (thankfully I had only 2)
could not create a citation. They found themselves in an infinite loop of Save Page with
Capcha when they tried to create a citation.
By the end of the session, I managed to refine the bug to a combination of “new user”,
“new article” (although created by me, not the new users), and citations involving a live
URL, duly reported at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#New_users_una…
Ironically it first happened on their newly created User Pages where we were practising
our new Wikipedia skills because tackling “real articles”. Then on the “real articles” I
had created earlier for them to use (a training approach that has the benefit of not
unleashing a horde of angry watchlisters when they make some silly mistake, which occurs
if you let new people make their early edits on “popular articles”). (Spot the pattern,
both were new articles!).
Now if this had happened to a new user sitting at home, they would have been stymied.
Because I was there to hold their hands in a training setting, I found a way around the
problem by logging them in as me and we continued the training session on that basis (but
not an option to the user sitting at home frustratingly typing in Capcha responses until
they got frustrated and walked away).
So, Aaron, it may be that your research on the impact of the VE was impacted by this bug.
I imagine that users affected would have eventually aborted the edit as they were unable
to save, unless by chance they were able to realise that the problem was caused by their
citation and either removed the citation and just saved the text changes. It’s hard to say
what the likelihood of a new user being affected is, as the problem seemed to relate to
the age of the article (I am autopatrolled so I don’t think the new articles would have
any “might be dodgy” status flags on them, but I am not familiar with how that side of
things works).
Also, is this experiment (or one similar) currently running? It’s just that when we went
into the Preferences of the two new user accounts to enable the VE, one of them already
had it enabled (yet I had seen both new user accounts created in front of me a couple of
minutes earlier), so there was no possibility that this was anything other than a default
setting for one of the two users. I thought enabling the VE was normally strictly opt-in?
Kerry
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