Hi all,
Thanks for your good insights about inline comments.
I totally agree that an annotation tool seems very attractive, and envision it being a bit
like what Google Docs offers, with comments in the margin. We've been wanting to do
something for a while now.
It's worth noting, however, that this type of annotation tool works great for small
workgroups, but doesn't scale well when you have hundreds or thousands of commenters
all posting on the same page, because there is no room to display all these highlights or
store all that info in the margins.
So there is a big design challenge for figuring out a viable solution to these issues. For
example, a secondary page or section may be necessary to store all these thousands of
comments, as we are doing now with Article feedback v5. (Though each of these comments
could include anchor information, so you can relate them to the section they are about).
Either way, this is way outside the scope of AFT5, which will remain in its current form
for the foreseeable future, as we are moving on to other editor engagement projects.
We plan to revisit some of these ideas again in Flow, when we expect to take on article
talk pages in early 2014. Even there, a secondary comments page would seem needed, to
avoid flooding the article talk pages with too many unhelpful comments, as many AFT5 RfC
participants pointed out.
And yes, we would love to see someone else develop a prototype based on these ideas, which
would be really interesting, particularly if they can solve some of the difficult UI
challenges ahead … More power to them.
In any case, thanks for the inspiration, and I look forward to revisiting these good
suggestions with you very soon -- once we have a resourced project that can take them into
consideration.
All the best,
Fabrice
On Mar 21, 2013, at 3:07 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Matthew Flaschen
<mflaschen(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 03/21/2013 05:53 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
Inline commenting is an extremely powerful tool
for sophisticated
editing. Lawyers are heavy users - we'd be happy to have our brains
picked if you'd like to discuss this idea more. :)
Indeed, as you may know, stet was used to develop GPLv3.
Yes, and we used co-ment (a successor tool) to develop MPLv2- see, for example:
https://mpl.co-ment.com/text/NMccndsidpP/view/
I will sorely miss the functionality when we next roll out a major policy document here.
It isn't always appropriate, but for small refinements to documents (which is a very
common use case) it is a much better way to discuss changes than talk pages. [Relatedly, I
wouldn't think of it as a "feedback tool", but rather as a discussion and
editing tool.]
Luis
--
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810
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