Forwarding emails (with permission) from Vibha and Maryana that might
shed some light (slightly edited to remove some unrelated content):
(From Vibha):
---
Hi Maryana,
I had some thoughts and questions on which we need your input. This is
realted to the Editing workflow, specifically edit summaries.
With apps, we are hoping for a relative friendly and stable editing
environment. A chunk of these will be first time edits.
We had looked at some canonical categories for mobile web if you
remember - The categories were
1. Modified Content 2. Added Links 3. Fixed Typos/ Grammar
Yuvi pointed to a gadget that adds checkboxes for common edit
summaries. Its an optional step, but one that could create a bit of
context if done right. Do you think this will help the new editor in
the edit workflow?
From a design perspective, this could serve 2 purposes
for new editors -
1. Discovery of common edit types. 2. Lightly reflect on their action
while being aware that there is a review process. 3. Making it easier
to explain what they did
I'll hover around your desk to show you some mocks so there's a bit
more context.
Thanks
----------------
From Maryana:
We had looked at some canonical categories for mobile web if you remember - The
categories were
1. Modified Content 2. Added Links 3. Fixed Typos/ Grammar
All three of those are the same thing (adding links and fixing typos
*are* modifying content) :)
Though it's a good idea in principle, I'm still not sure there's a set
of categories that make sense, since editing (even VE editing) is so
open-ended. And, again, if you have all mobile app edits tagged with
the same canned edit summary – even if there are 3 options to choose
from, human psychology indicates people will gravitate toward the
first or most open-ended option – you're not providing anything useful
to the community who's monitoring these edits, and they're the ones it
really matters for. It's not clear to me what value to the app user
it's providing to have to stop and figure out which of 3 very high
level categories their edit belongs to; that feels like a test or a
CAPTCHA or something. In fact, this might be something to consider in
order to intentionally reduce editing velocity if you see a lot of
low-quality edits coming from this vector.
If you want to provide the additional context to the community that
these edits are coming from an app, people could be new & not quite
know what they're doing, etc., you could just use "Edited with the
Wikipedia mobile app" as the summary.
Yuvi pointed to a gadget that adds checkboxes for common edit summaries. Its an optional
step, but one that could create a bit of context if done right. Do you think this will
help the new editor in the edit workflow?
From a design perspective, this could serve 2 purposes for new editors -
1. Discovery of common edit types. 2. Lightly reflect on their action while being aware
that there is a review process. 3. Making it easier to explain what they did
I can see how having this data would be useful for analytics purposes,
certainly, but you're also probably going to find a lot of
miscategorization, people rushing through the process just to submit
their edit, etc., so it's not all that better than qualitative
hand-coding, which is how we get that data now.