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drafts, poor merging, and swooping editors, feels incredibly outdated and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
On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 12:35 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Luca wrote:
Re. the edit conflicts happening when a new user is editing:
Can't one add some AJAX to the editor that notifies that one
still has the editing window open? Maybe editors could wait to
modify work in progress, if they had that indication, and if the
content does not seem vandalism?
Instead of asking editors to wait, we could improve the merge
algorithm to avoid conflicts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(revision_control)
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