[WikiEN-l] So what does Flagged Revs feel like?

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 6:20 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> If you want to know how Flagged Revisions feels from an unprivileged
>> position, go to Wikinews and fix typos. I just did this on
>>
>> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Geelong_win_2009_Australian_Football_League_Grand_Final
>> - check the history. I'm not an admin or reviewer on en:wn.
>>
>> What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live
>> immediately left me wondering just when it would - five minutes/? An
>> hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki - it felt like I'd
>> submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at
>> their leisure.
>>     
>
>
> UI fail.
>
> There is no reason for you to know or care that your edit isn't being
> displayed to the general public.  It's being displayed to you, it's
> being displayed to all the other editors, it's being displayed to
> anons who click a link to see the latest.
>   
I hope you won't feel bad about me saying that I most
deeply and soundly disagree with the above view.

The thing that -- at the very least used to -- attracts newbies
to wikipedia is the "positive astonishment" factor: 'What, I
just edited this web-page, and everybody all over the world
saw the result immediately! That can't be right, there has to
be a catch somewhere! Wow, there isn't! That is what *really*
happens! Awesome!'

For this reason, I won't ever agree that being visible for
in house 'editors' or casual folks sophisticated enough to check
and see if there are new non-approved edits, as a
default, is good universally, rather than as a last resort.


> It's our own damn fault for making the UI say the equivalent of "NOW
> YOU MUST WAIT WHILE OUR TRIBE OF ELDERS SCRUTINIZES YOUR PATHETIC
> EDIT" …  we don't have to do it this way, and we shouldn't do it this
> way.
>
> The process can and should be made mostly invisible to casual editors.
>   

Like I said, you don't want the process to be 'invisible'
to casual editors, you want it to be *transparently open*.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen