On 10/9/2010 6:15 PM, David Goodman wrote:
Still, it is more consultation than was had for some
previous changes,
but, when you propose tshowing the unreviewed pages only to
reviewers. do you mean
I. Not letting anyone see an unreviewed edit unless they have reviewer status
or,
II. Showing the unreviewed pages _by default_ only to reviewers, but
still letting anyone, logged in or not , see them easily if they want
to
Perhaps the way Rob's mail was written wasn't clear because neither of
these are on the docket for the November release. I'll take the blame
for that; I was the proofreader because he didn't want to misrepresent
what I wanted to do.
As to the first bit, I think there's some confusion as to my
recommendation.
Currently, if a series of pending changes is under review by a
reviewer, and you (or anyone) go to the pending changes list, anyone can
see that the article is under review. I don't have a problem with that
except that I don't think there's much value to non-reviewers by itself.
However, combined with my primary recommendation that feature - that we
should include the name of the person doing the reviewing - we should
hide the "under review" status from the general public since it is going
to be extra clutter.
So, to be clear, we are not talking about altering the ability for
users to read pending changes, only altering the ability for users to
know that *someone else* is reading the pending changes.
That being said, I do feel strongly that the viewing experience should
be the same for both logged in and anonymous users and the fact that it
changes is simply wrong. Users (of all kinds) should easily be able to
find and read the pending changes but that doesn't mean they should be
shown them by default.
Currently, the behavior is:
* Anonymous users see the Accepted version by default
* Logged in users see the Pending version by default
That is very plainly a bad design decision. It doesn't require a lot
of burden on my end, either, to prove the statement "users hate it when
the behavior of a system changes based on what is, to them, an arbitrary
and vague set of rules."
That's to say nothing of the fact that I think it actually runs
*contrary* to the expressed motivation for the feature in the first
place. It's things like this that create a schizophrenia in the feature.
Either way, addressing that for November isn't on the table. What
*is*, however, is surfacing in a more obvious manner that users are
viewing a Pending version, or an Accepted version, and that, I think,
can be done.