On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 4:18 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
- 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).
Absolutely. We need to pre-fab the PR on this to the greatest extent possible. Including an announcement of what we're going to do and when, then an announcement of what we've done.
But I don't think that any of that interacts much with the fine details of how the implementation works.
I think that for usability we need to assume that the user has probably missed all our fantastic announcements and explanations.
- 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.
This is absolutely true. But I think it's completely impossible to explain to a listener who isn't going to invest at least 5 minutes in hearing our explanation. So this is an important point on the PR front, but I don't think we learn anything useful for software usability from it.
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.
This is basically the heart of my concern: That one edit is important, that it isn't lost is important. That the site making it disappear will be very upsetting for a least some people some of the time. ... and that no amount of explanatory boiler plate can eliminate that problem because some people will miss it due to banner blindness or simply not understand it.
Would they go and look at the article again later (post session-cookie) to see if their change stuck? I think they probably would.
Absolutely. But I would expect and hope that the median review time is minutes, for typical and uncontroversial changes. If it's not— then we need to improve the review process, because we're managing median vandalism revert times less than that.
I also think the experience of seeing an edit "go live" is pretty magical.
I think what we ought to try to do is to preserve the magic for protected pages as much as we can. Even with a full understanding of the implications— that your change is on the draft page rather than the primary one, it's still pretty magical.
This is important for new contributor relations because even if protection is only ever used on the "small number" pages which are currently semi/protected they all tend to be fairly high traffic pages. It's pretty likely that that flagged page behaviour will completely define the new contributors first experience with Wikipedia. As you pointed out— delayed is better than denied, but...
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.
Full agreement, I think. I just am concerned that we retain the kind of positive outlook that you've presented here rather than the negative outlook which focuses on how the contributor is being restricted.
[snip]
- 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.
I don't think the goal of "More accurate™" is in conflict with "Maximally inclusive in whom is allowed to edit". Through the power of the default-view and the power of transparency we can have _both_, and I think the community has demanded a system which provides as much.
The challenge here is that the initial impression for "review" and "More accurate" is a secretive, restrictive, controlled, and slowly moving system... largely because this what traditional mediums provide. While "inclusive" is viewed as a crazy anything-goes anarchy (which was never really applicable to Wikipedia, even before protection). I think the message we need to express is that we're trying to combine the qualities of both extremes into a moderate composite which is even closer to the radical openness of the early Wikipedia while simultaneously being more accurate than the current system.
I don't know how to craft a PR message around this because to an outsider it sounds impossible for exactly the same reason that the whole idea of Wikipedia sounds impossible. People are very quick to jump to the 'restrictive' understanding because it makes Wikipedia finally make sense: "See! radical openness really doesn't work!"