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
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Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
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