Hi,
I wondered where to raise this and decided to do it here.
The message that asks for to write the edit summary in VisualEditor is "Describe what you changed".
In the source editor it's just "Summary" in the core. In the English Wikipedia, however, it's modified to "[[Help:Edit summary|Edit summary]] (Briefly describe the changes you have made)".
The VisualEditor is used a lot by new editors (it's an impression, but I'm pretty sure that the data will say the same). The idea of the edit summary is to help the people who patrol recent changes or read the article history. When new editors, who aren't so familiar with Wikipedia's edit summary culture, are asked to "Describe what you changed", they may answer: "the year when he was born". This is a correct answer as far as the editor is concerned, but it's not so helpful in the context of recent changes.
I don't know about other languages, but this actually happens quite a lot in the Hebrew Wikipedia, and some patrollers are complaining about it. (In grammatical terms, the summary is written as a direct object: "Describe what you changed" -> (I changed) "the year".)
Now I could change this to something clearer in the translation to this particular language, but I like to be thorough when it comes to UI messages, so I'd like to ask the pros here: How would you design the edit summary box? The requirements I can think of are: 1. Encourage the user to actually write the edit summary. People not writing summaries at all is a bigger problem than writing them not clearly as I wrote above. 2. Encourage to write it in a way that would be useful to the people who will read them in Recent Changes and in reviewing previous article versions. 3. Possibly give the users tips about how to write them well, but without too much additional text.
Thanks!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Well for one thing, "describe _what_ you changed" is already incorrect of course. The changes are already visible to the patrollers in the diff. What we usually want people to describe is WHY they made the change ("The birth year was incorrect/not yet present").
Also, I think that this is really one of those areas that can benefit from "Getting started" tutorials to just SHOW people what we expect of them. As the folks from Google say; it's much easier to teach people new behavior then is often assumed, as long as you give examples.
DJ
On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi,
I wondered where to raise this and decided to do it here.
The message that asks for to write the edit summary in VisualEditor is "Describe what you changed".
In the source editor it's just "Summary" in the core. In the English Wikipedia, however, it's modified to "[[Help:Edit summary|Edit summary]] (Briefly describe the changes you have made)".
The VisualEditor is used a lot by new editors (it's an impression, but I'm pretty sure that the data will say the same). The idea of the edit summary is to help the people who patrol recent changes or read the article history. When new editors, who aren't so familiar with Wikipedia's edit summary culture, are asked to "Describe what you changed", they may answer: "the year when he was born". This is a correct answer as far as the editor is concerned, but it's not so helpful in the context of recent changes.
I don't know about other languages, but this actually happens quite a lot in the Hebrew Wikipedia, and some patrollers are complaining about it. (In grammatical terms, the summary is written as a direct object: "Describe what you changed" -> (I changed) "the year".)
Now I could change this to something clearer in the translation to this particular language, but I like to be thorough when it comes to UI messages, so I'd like to ask the pros here: How would you design the edit summary box? The requirements I can think of are:
- Encourage the user to actually write the edit summary. People not writing
summaries at all is a bigger problem than writing them not clearly as I wrote above. 2. Encourage to write it in a way that would be useful to the people who will read them in Recent Changes and in reviewing previous article versions. 3. Possibly give the users tips about how to write them well, but without too much additional text.
Thanks!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On 3 June 2014 04:32, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi,
I wondered where to raise this and decided to do it here.
The message that asks for to write the edit summary in VisualEditor is "Describe what you changed".
In the source editor it's just "Summary" in the core. In the English Wikipedia, however, it's modified to "[[Help:Edit summary|Edit summary]] (Briefly describe the changes you have made)".
Indeed. This is the outcome of several iterations of the messaging around the edit summary box to see what the effect was. It's not by accident that it differs from the label used for wikitext.
Potentially we should consider making the same improvements for the wikitext editor, but we've not considered doing that yet.
J.
James Forrester, 03/06/2014 18:41:
Indeed. This is the outcome of several iterations of the messaging around the edit summary box to see what the effect was. It's not by accident that it differs from the label used for wikitext.
Rationale is not documented hence translators will not know how to reflect the features you're after in their translations. https://translatewiki.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Visualeditor-editsummary/qqq
MobileFrontend is not in sync either: https://translatewiki.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Mobile-frontend-editor-summary-plac...
Potentially we should consider making the same improvements for the wikitext editor, but we've not considered doing that yet.
Would be trivial if the edit summary had a placeholder like the search bar.
Nemo
Along with fine tuning the label of the Summary field adding placeholder text in the input box like "The X was Y" might help set the tone of what the editor ends up writing. Deciding what the the text would actually be would be a longer discussion.
—prtksxna
The label of the Summary field in the VisualEditor is "Edit Summary (Briefly describe the changes you have made)". And the placeholder text is "Describe what you changed". This is redundant. I think retaining this label and changing the placeholder text to something on the lines of what Prateek suggested might be a good idea.
-- Shrihari
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Prateek Saxena psaxena@wikimedia.org wrote:
Along with fine tuning the label of the Summary field adding placeholder text in the input box like "The X was Y" might help set the tone of what the editor ends up writing. Deciding what the the text would actually be would be a longer discussion.
—prtksxna
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On 05.06.2014 12:32, Shrihari Sankaran wrote:
The label of the Summary field in the VisualEditor is "Edit Summary (Briefly describe the changes you have made)". And the placeholder text is "Describe what you changed". This is redundant. I think retaining this label and changing the placeholder text to something on the lines of what Prateek suggested might be a good idea.
Agreed. The placeholder attribute is specifically intended to provide an example to "aid the user with data entry" (see spec http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/embedded-content.html#the-placeholder-attribute). This seems to me like a good opportunity to improve user experience quite easily by actually providing an example of exactly the type of edit summary we want.
We'd need to come up with a really good sample edit summary though. I'd suggest something short and simple like "/For example: Updated data according to new research/". Thoughts?
best, max @awesomephant https://twitter.com/awesomephant
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 4:41 PM, max max@koehler-kn.de wrote:
We'd need to come up with a really good sample edit summary though. I'd suggest something short and simple like "For example: Updated data according to new research". Thoughts?
I'd get rid of the "For example: " and keep the rest of the stuff. On second thoughts that might confuse a new editor. They might think that that is what they were supposed to do (research seems a bit intimidating at first) and might not submit a simple typo fix. I think that adding a few examples or the canned summaries separated by "/" might be helpful—"Fixed typos / Added links".
—prtksxna
On 05.06.2014 14:02, Prateek Saxena wrote:
I'd get rid of the "For example: " and keep the rest of the stuff. On second thoughts that might confuse a new editor. They might think that that is what they were supposed to do (research seems a bit intimidating at first) and might not submit a simple typo fix. I think that adding a few examples or the canned summaries separated by "/" might be helpful—"Fixed typos / Added links".
Happy to hear you agree that having an example edit summary is a good idea here. You're probably right about my research thing being a bit intimidating, as well as the "for example" part being unnecessary.
best, max