Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 6:20 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If you want to know how Flagged Revisions feels
from an unprivileged
position, go to Wikinews and fix typos. I just did this on
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Geelong_win_2009_Australian_Football_League_Gra…
- check the history. I'm not an admin or reviewer on en:wn.
What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live
immediately left me wondering just when it would - five minutes/? An
hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki - it felt like I'd
submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at
their leisure.
UI fail.
There is no reason for you to know or care that your edit isn't being
displayed to the general public. It's being displayed to you, it's
being displayed to all the other editors, it's being displayed to
anons who click a link to see the latest.
I hope you won't feel bad about me saying that I most
deeply and soundly disagree with the above view.
The thing that -- at the very least used to -- attracts newbies
to wikipedia is the "positive astonishment" factor: 'What, I
just edited this web-page, and everybody all over the world
saw the result immediately! That can't be right, there has to
be a catch somewhere! Wow, there isn't! That is what *really*
happens! Awesome!'
For this reason, I won't ever agree that being visible for
in house 'editors' or casual folks sophisticated enough to check
and see if there are new non-approved edits, as a
default, is good universally, rather than as a last resort.
It's our own damn fault for making the UI say the
equivalent of "NOW
YOU MUST WAIT WHILE OUR TRIBE OF ELDERS SCRUTINIZES YOUR PATHETIC
EDIT" … we don't have to do it this way, and we shouldn't do it this
way.
The process can and should be made mostly invisible to casual editors.
Like I said, you don't want the process to be 'invisible'
to casual editors, you want it to be *transparently open*.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen