Designing a usable and scalable inline annotation system, compatible with versioning and text anchors/fragments that change over time is a hugely complex problem.

There is a non-profit organization out there called hypothes.is [1] that is trying to design such a system using open source technology and open standards [2]. They have been very interested in the Wikipedia use case (and – Luis – collaborative annotation of bills too!). They are going to showcase their first beta at an upcoming workshop in SF in April [3]. 

Personally, I'd rather see us partner with an open source partner who is already tackling this complex problem and sharing our core principles instead of embarking into a gigantic new project, after what we've learned with AFT, so <what Fabrice and Oliver said> :)

Dario

[1] http://hypothes.is/

[2] http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/

[3] http://iannotate.org/

On Mar 21, 2013, at 3:22 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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@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

NOTICE: This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity.

_______________________________________________
EE mailing list
EE@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin

Product Manager, Editor Engagement

Wikimedia Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

Donate to keep Wikipedia free:

https://donate.wikimedia.org/

_______________________________________________
EE mailing list
EE@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

_______________________________________________
EE mailing list
EE@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee