On 20/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Mmmh. I'm much more in favour of a solution that *isn't* {{sofixit}} -
this is not just for people who don't realise they can edit, it's also
for the substantial number of people who don't *want* to, but would
vaguely like to help in some way*.
What I would like to see is the following:
A sidebar button, of some form. "Found a mistake?" "Problem?"
"Report
a problem", whatever. You click this, it spawns a new window**, and
says
---
Think there's a problem with this article?
a) Click here to flag the article for attention [submit button]
-or- (preferred)
b) Leave us a message describing the problem, which will help us fix
it [textbox and submit button]
---
If they don't want to have *any interaction at all* beyond pressing
that button, it's fine, and we should take that input without
demanding more out of them. (We can always ignore it if it's not
helpful)
As to what happens then...
a) We make this an email-form. It gets routed straight to some kind of
OTRS-like ticket system, which has fairly liberal access given to it -
the point here isn't to make it "private", it's to make it easy to see
what's been handled and when a backlog builds up.
b) We send "message describing the problem" straight as some kind of
new section to a central page for this sort of thing, and have "flag
this article" just subst a standard template ({{lookatthis}} - heh)
onto there. Remember, these articles are likely to be dormant ones, so
a talkpage message may well be ineffective...
c) The same as b), except it makes some kind of "mask account" do it,
rather than just the edit being treated as coming from the reader -
who, after all, may be banned unknown to themselves. It also ensures
anonymity of flaggin, which may be seen as desirable.
These may require some kind of not-quite-MediaWiki implementation, but
that would in some ways be good - we want this to be free of some of
the mediawiki constraints, like IP-blocking and so forth.
I'm personally quite taken by a), since it would seem to scale better
than a single page, but it has the detriment fewer people would handle
it. On the other hand, it would ensure some level of privacy if, eg,
people started leaving personal info in their messages.
Thoughts?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
* An awful lot of emails to OTRS boil down to "I don't want to
edit/don't feel comfortable editing/am incapable of editing, but
thought you should know about problem XYZ with this article." We need
to find some way of making practical use of these people...
**if this is possible and won't cause problems with popup-blockers