[WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[William Pietri]

On 04/29/2010 03:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
>>      
>
> Can you point me to where it was decided to admonish new editors with statements like "Changes will be published once an authorized user reviews them." (in all red) after they make an edit.
>
> I don't see what purpose this message can serve except to discourage editing.
>
> If instead the site simply completed the edit like normal and set a
> session cookie that causes that client to view the most current rather
> than the "published" version of that article, then the editing
> experience for a new editor would remain identical to the experience
> that they have now:  They make an edit, they see their edit on the
> site, they can browse away and come back without it immediately
> disappearing, and they can return days later and find their edit still
> there or not depending on the other users of the site being willing to
> accept it.
>    

Hi! Good question.

My understanding, possibly incorrect, is that we can't do that. Because 
most pages for non-logged-in users are served from caches, most requests 
don't make it to the point where we can easily show different versions 
of a page based on cookie.

So the notice shows up because we didn't want people to have the even 
worse user experience of seeing their change disappear for no apparent 
reason, when really it was just waiting to be approved.

I'll double-check this with the rest of the team to make sure I got that 
right, but that's my understanding.  Naturally, if anybody has 
suggestions to improve the wording of the message, or anything else that 
improves the user experience, we'd love to hear them. The optimum place 
to put them is here:

http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:FlaggedRevs_issues


William