Forwarding emails (with permission) from Vibha and Maryana that might shed some light (slightly edited to remove some unrelated content):
(From Vibha): ---
Hi Maryana,
I had some thoughts and questions on which we need your input. This is realted to the Editing workflow, specifically edit summaries.
With apps, we are hoping for a relative friendly and stable editing environment. A chunk of these will be first time edits.
We had looked at some canonical categories for mobile web if you remember - The categories were
1. Modified Content 2. Added Links 3. Fixed Typos/ Grammar
Yuvi pointed to a gadget that adds checkboxes for common edit summaries. Its an optional step, but one that could create a bit of context if done right. Do you think this will help the new editor in the edit workflow?
From a design perspective, this could serve 2 purposes for new editors -
1. Discovery of common edit types. 2. Lightly reflect on their action while being aware that there is a review process. 3. Making it easier to explain what they did
I'll hover around your desk to show you some mocks so there's a bit more context.
Thanks
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From Maryana:
We had looked at some canonical categories for mobile web if you remember - The categories were
- Modified Content 2. Added Links 3. Fixed Typos/ Grammar
All three of those are the same thing (adding links and fixing typos *are* modifying content) :)
Though it's a good idea in principle, I'm still not sure there's a set of categories that make sense, since editing (even VE editing) is so open-ended. And, again, if you have all mobile app edits tagged with the same canned edit summary – even if there are 3 options to choose from, human psychology indicates people will gravitate toward the first or most open-ended option – you're not providing anything useful to the community who's monitoring these edits, and they're the ones it really matters for. It's not clear to me what value to the app user it's providing to have to stop and figure out which of 3 very high level categories their edit belongs to; that feels like a test or a CAPTCHA or something. In fact, this might be something to consider in order to intentionally reduce editing velocity if you see a lot of low-quality edits coming from this vector.
If you want to provide the additional context to the community that these edits are coming from an app, people could be new & not quite know what they're doing, etc., you could just use "Edited with the Wikipedia mobile app" as the summary.
Yuvi pointed to a gadget that adds checkboxes for common edit summaries. Its an optional step, but one that could create a bit of context if done right. Do you think this will help the new editor in the edit workflow?
From a design perspective, this could serve 2 purposes for new editors -
- Discovery of common edit types. 2. Lightly reflect on their action while being aware that there is a review process. 3. Making it easier to explain what they did
I can see how having this data would be useful for analytics purposes, certainly, but you're also probably going to find a lot of miscategorization, people rushing through the process just to submit their edit, etc., so it's not all that better than qualitative hand-coding, which is how we get that data now.