Sure, and I'm all for trying new things - if you know me you know this is the case - I'm all for stabs at anything. It was just something interesting I saw in the apps that I hadn't come across before, and I was wondering about it for the purpose of mobile web and whether such a thing would be useful there.
It wasn't 100% clear to me however what the goals for canned edit summaries were and what the rationale was for it - hence this discussion. I imagine there is data to back up the need for this, but there is no conversation anywhere on a mailing list - so hence this conversation and a request to please share that and show me they are useful so I spend my free time coding it for mobile web :-).
I know I personally with an autocomplete/tag setup would become lazy. Whereas I might currently use an edit summary like "it's->its" might instead resort to the easy "Spelling/grammar change". I don't know which of those edit summaries would be more useful to the people that deal with them on a day to day basis.
On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:18 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
I worry tags will encourage laziness and on the long term not very useful summaries for poor wiki patrollers. There are other ways to educate e.g. help icon that elaborates or "see some examples".
Jon: don't worry about that. We already use mass revision tagging effectively this way with AbuseFilter, and in extensions like GettingStarted, mobile, or VisualEditor. Patrollers see thousands and thousands of edits, and these tags really do help with context.
I think it's good to do some exploratory design with canned edit summaries, if we keep in mind that this is new and we've never put something like this in production before. It may or may not work, but it doesn't hurt to take a stab at it. In my mind, the challenge here is not the UI. Whether it's tags or a dropdown or whatever we can work out easily. The hard part is figuring out what edit summaries are so common that they should be canned. Since there are so many different kinds of edits, that's the difficult part.
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/