On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:08 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 3 May 2010 19:56, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Alternatively, simply giving the users a link to a page describing the complete edit life-cycle, "This page is [[protected]].", would be fine as well... those who care could go get a complete understanding, the vast majority who don't care about the minutia of the editing process can comfortably ignore it and not worry that their edit is LESS likely to be used then it use to be.
Saying who the edit is visible to ("Your edit is visible to you and any logged-in users") rather than who it isn't visible to ("Your edit has been placed in a collective in tray for someone to get around to sometime maybe never") would probably be nicer too.
As long as it's clear enough!
I think I agree with David. But I think it might be helpful to go through the possible situations.
1. problem: no one understands what's going on. 1a. time should be spent, by someone who understands it -- and then by someone who doesn't to copyedit* -- on writing a very, very, very clear explanation of the flaggedrevs setup that is planned for implementation. Then this page can be linked to in whatever noticebox explanation that may or may not appear on editing. It can also be given to news reporters, because you know the "wikipedia has implemented review" stories are going to start flying once we set this thing up on en: (they already started flying when it was just a proposal).
2. problem: psychology of the anonymous editor: what's the best outcome for a in-good-faith editor? 2a. we already disallow anons from editing semiprotected articles. So in lieu of that, having a box that pops up that says "this article is under protection, and therefore your edit is subject to review" doesn't seem so bad. Note this isn't necessarily a great solution for the entire site, but just for those articles that were formerly uneditable at all by anons.
2b. For editing in general (assuming it ever gets that far), I can think of a few test cases. My sense of the matter is that for experienced editors making a change is not such a big deal; each individual edit neither costs us much or is that important to our experience of the site. But if you are a new editor -- let's say a newly registered account or anon -- each change is worth a lot and is meaningful. I've certainly talked to a lot of folks interested in wikipedia who have told me, proudly, that they have made five edits. For those folks, their five edits are individually each important -- important in their understanding of how wikipedia works and for their sense of being a contributor.
That said, I think we need to try and imagine people's behavior around their edits. Would they go and look at the article again later (post session-cookie) to see if their change stuck? I think they probably would. I also think the experience of seeing an edit "go live" is pretty magical. So how we deal with this is dependent on 1, how flaggedrevs works -- but I would think that some sort of clarifying statement -- who the edit is visible to, and where to go to see the version with the edit -- might be nice rather than the impression, on later viewing, that they've been reverted because their edit isn't showing up.
2c. for non-good-faith editors -- vandals -- it might be nice to also have a notice to this affect, to let people know that their edits are being looked at; each vandalism transaction does have a cost and it could be good to let people know that.
2d. Having the data on how long it takes to flag revisions would be nice -- and I suspect that if the trial is started with only protected/semiprotected articles it won't be long at all. If it's only minutes the messages might be slimmed down & Greg's idea of an invisible transaction carries more weight with me.
3. problem: we don't really know how this is going to pan out 3a. I see a lot of conflicting rhetoric about why we want flaggedrevs and what its role is. Indeed, if the goal is to promote wikipedia as more accurate (tm), then I see no special problem about notifying people that their edits are reviewed -- as Anthony says some might welcome it. If we want it to be an invisible process, part of the mysterious inner workings of the site along with template markup and RFCs, then Greg's idea makes more sense.
-- Phoebe
* for instance, I have no idea what's going on, despite following this thing half-heartedly for years. so I'm pretty sure I could copyedit the documentation from the point of view of a clueless n00b.