The app team showed a demo to the mobile web team today of the latest
editing experience for the new Wikipedia app that is being worked on.
The mobile app editing experience was very consistent with mobile web
which is a great thing, that said it had one significant difference -
canned edit summaries.
The interface showed various buttons that when clicked would populate
the edit summary input. e.g. "Fixed typos/grammar" or "Added links")
I wanted to discuss whether this is a good idea?
If the goal is to give ideas to users on what they can do to edit, we
should be doing that at the start of the workflow in my opinion - tell
a new user what they can, give them a better idea using the article
issues templates.
If the goal is to make the users editing experience easier (which it
should be), personally I think it would be more useful to have an
autocomplete that allows an editor to recycle older edit summaries.
PS. Is there a link to a wiki page for these designs, so other people
can see what I'm talking about?