Jonathan,
I think you are right. My impression, as someone who now is a bit of an
"outsider" in the sense that it's long time I have not done an edit, is
that Wikipedia - that is, Mediawiki - is in need of a usability overhaul.
Other sites where people write just feel smoother, from Blogger to Google
Docs to WordPress. Other sites just feel more welcoming, such as
openstreetmap, where I can fix the map without anyone immediately coming to
bite me or to create edit conflicts (a big part of the reason why I put my
time there nowadays when I feel like contributing to the common good).
Wikipedia has a concomitance of factors -- no saving of drafts, editors
immediately jumping in as soon as one saves, no delay in making information
live, obscure set of rules that are simply not known to novices, ... it
just doesn't feel like a place where a normal user is welcome. It also
feels "old" in the clumsy way it can be edited. As it is losing its
novelty factor, this is a problem.
Luca
On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 9:46 PM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Attn Luca and Scott
There are some things best avoided as going against community
expectations. I would be happy to see flagged revisions deployed on the
English Wikipedia but I'm well aware that there is a significant lobby
against that of people who believe that it is important that your edit goes
live immediately. And with the community somewhat burned by bad experiences
with recent software changes now would be a bad time to suggest such a
controversial change.
Saving drafts is potentially more doable. My preference for new articles
is to start them in sandboxes, that way you are highly unlikely to get
uninvited editors unless you are creating an attack page or committing
copyright violation. For existing articles you can simply copy and paste
your draft of a paragraph into your own sandbox, but this is not exactly
intuitive for new editors. Leaving a tab open on your PC is not viable if
you are at an editathon, especially if you are on a borrowed PC, but it
works at home. My recommendation is to encourage people to save little and
often, however that still leaves situations where people need to simply
save a paragraph or two somewhere privately. One option would be to write a
gadget that gave people the option to save work to sandbox. They could then
highlight the bit they are working on, or even let mediawiki suggest the
bit they are working on, and have the paragraph appended as a new section
on their sandbox with an auto generated edit summary giving attribution.
That would require development but would I think be uncontentious.
Better merging would also be uncontentious with the editing community, but
has historically been opposed by the developers. There several suggestions
on Bugzilla marooned as "won't fix" it may be that this is a communication
problem and the developers have a good reason such as not having the source
code, but at present it looks like they as programmers don't understand how
difficult it is for non programmers to resolve an edit conflict.
I would love to see some sort of private draft space created for editors
where only they can see stuff. This would require a software change and a
cultural change. Space is now so cheap that we can afford to have tens of
thousands of editors each have a few megabytes of private space that only
they can see and which no one need check because no one has access. But the
idea of unchecked space and free hosting is controversial to some, I
suspect it would require the foundation to say what the cost of a gigabyte
of extra userspace was and for WMF legal to green light the idea of not
checking the contents of things that only the person who wrote them can see.
There is an element of tension between better merging and private drafts.
Basically the more differences emerge between the draft and the main space
copy the more difficult to merge them back, this is one of the reasons why
some people don't think that flagged revisions or pending changes is
suitable for rapidly changing articles. That's why my preference is to save
little and often and privately store the sentence you want to add not your
version of an article.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 26 Sep 2014, at 04:58, Scott Hale <computermacgyver(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, drafts visible only to the user are different. I was thinking of
flagged revisions in reference to your idea that edits would first go live
only after a set period of time. This is basically flagged revisions with a
trivial extension that the flagged revision always be the latest revision
that is at least X minutes old.
We could also allow a time window (even 30 minutes) before edits went live
after one is done editing (using above Ajax
mechanism to track when editor
open), experienced editors would not need to swoop in quite so fast on the
work of new users, and the whole editing atmosphere would be more relaxed
and welcoming.
I think the challenge with drafts visible only to the user is that they
are very likely to have a conflict and have to merge changes if they wait
too long between starting the draft and later committing it.
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 9:20 AM, Luca de Alfaro <luca(a)dealfaro.com> wrote:
Flagged revisions is different though, as it
requires "trusted" editors
to flag things as approved. I am simply advocating the ability to save
drafts visible only to oneself before "publishing" a change. WordPress,
Blogger, etc have it. And so newcomers could edit to their heart content,
without triggering the interest of editors and the consequent conflicts,
then save their changes.
Luca
On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 5:15 PM, Scott Hale <computermacgyver(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 5:14 AM, Luca de Alfaro
<luca(a)dealfaro.com>
wrote:
Better merging would be welcome. But also less
aggressive
editing/policing.
When I edit openstreetmap I have a better overall experience: the edits
may or may not go live immediately, but I don't have the impression that
there is someone aggressively vetting/refining my edits while I am still
doing them. I feel welcome there.
To make Wikipedia more welcoming, we could do a few things.
We could allow users to save drafts. In this way, people could work
for a while at their own pace, and then publish the changes. Currently,
saving is the only way to avoid risking losing changes, but it has the very
undesired effect of inviting editors/vetters to the page before one is
really done.
We could also allow a time window (even 30 minutes) before edits went
live after one is done editing (using above Ajax mechanism to track when
editor open), experienced editors would not need to swoop in quite so fast
on the work of new users, and the whole editing atmosphere would be more
relaxed and welcoming.
The fact is that the Wikipedia editor, with its lack of ability to save
drafts, poor merging, and swooping editors, feels incredibly outdated and
unwelcoming - downright aggressive - to anyone used to WordPress / Google
Docs / Blogger / ...
Luca
The technology exists to do this---[[:en:Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions]].
The challenge is that many existing users don't want flagged revisions on
by default.
And that is the fundamental flaw with this whole email thread. The
question needing to be answered isn't "what increases new user retention".
The real question is "what increases new user retention and is acceptable
to the most active/helpful existing users". The second question is much
harder than the first.
--
Scott Hale
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
http://www.scotthale.net/
scott.hale(a)oii.ox.ac.uk
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