On 21/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/20/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Mmmh. I'm much more in favour of a solution
that *isn't* {{sofixit}} -
this is not just for people who don't realise they can edit, it's also
for the substantial number of people who don't *want* to, but would
vaguely like to help in some way*.
Well put.
We get an awful lot of emails which say "you guys are the best thing
since sliced bread, and I love you all dearly, it's wonderful that
anyone can edit... er, please fix the following typo for me since I'm
feart."
It's hard to kick that kind of person with {{sofixit}} ;-)
a) We make
this an email-form. It gets routed straight to some kind of
OTRS-like ticket system, which has fairly liberal access given to it -
the point here isn't to make it "private", it's to make it easy to see
what's been handled and when a backlog builds up.
Every second time I hear the word OTRS it's "OTRS is totally
overloaded, is there some way of taking the pressure off?" My
preferred solution (I think I mentioned it earlier) would be to place
a message on the talk page, and to link to it from some centralised
page. If done carefully, that centralised page could show which items
still need to be addressed. Bearing in mind of course that if a talk
page message *doesn't* get addressed immediately, it's not the end of
the world, it happens frequently as it is.
When I say OTRS-like it's deliberate - this isn't going to be bolted
on to the existing system for handling @wikimedia.org emails, but
rather a seperate handling system which uses the same (or similar)
software and concepts. Basically, just something that lets us see
what's open, what's closed, what's being handled.
A monitored category, with talk-page tags, would probably work as well
for this, if a few people take it under their wing. Even if all we do
is tag it for cleanup etc, at least it means there are "this article
is Really Crappy" warnings on it for any future readers.
In the long run, I honestly see this taking pressure off main-OTRS -
it means that the people who will jump through the extra hoop or three
to contact us directly are likely to be those with a problem more
significant that "OMG someone vandalised this page".
c) The same as
b), except it makes some kind of "mask account" do it,
rather than just the edit being treated as coming from the reader -
who, after all, may be banned unknown to themselves. It also ensures
anonymity of flaggin, which may be seen as desirable.
Is anonymity desirable here? Why?
I feel it would be nice, in many ways; logging IP addresses is
defensible for contributions, but for something as trivial as a
critical comment... IMO it's overkill. YMMV.
An additional benefit of the "single flagging account" is that we can
trivially go back and see how the system is being used, just by
looking at the contributions of that single "user".
These may
require some kind of not-quite-MediaWiki implementation, but
that would in some ways be good - we want this to be free of some of
the mediawiki constraints, like IP-blocking and so forth.
What if someone uses this new mechanism to avoid their IP block and be
a pain? How would we stop them?
*shrug* All they're able to do is leave ranty screeds on talkpages. We
can just dump those if it gets abused.
I do honestly feel that preventing blocks from governing this gives us
a net benefit - sure, we'll get some abuse, but we'll also get the
opportunity for a lot of users who would otherwise be unable to
participate to leave comments. (Think of AOL users, or those behind
school rangeblocks, etc etc)
I'm
personally quite taken by a), since it would seem to scale better
than a single page, but it has the detriment fewer people would handle
it. On the other hand, it would ensure some level of privacy if, eg,
If someone is flagging a specific problem with article X, it doesn't
seem to make sense to me to send it only to a central repository.
Talk:X very much seems the right place, if not the only place.
Ask yourself this: would it have worked for Siegenthaler, or for some
random hoax article in a walled garden? Talk-and-categorising would
work, I suppose - same effective result as central flagging.
people started
leaving personal info in their messages.
Yeah, that would be a problem. A sufficiently loud warning "Please do
*not* leave any contact information here - your message will be made
public." should be able to cover that.
How about "this article is about me, and..." cases?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk