[WikiEN-l] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:11 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3 May 2010 17:59, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As the software currently stands, however,  it generates some rather
>> obnoxious messages advising you that your edits won't be visible until
>> they've been reviewed... but I hope that we get rid of that before
>> launch.
>
>
> I'm sure we'll eventually reach a wording that concisely explains
> what's happening without putting people off.
>
> (I suspect we'll rapidly end up with a grammatical briar bush that's
> hopelessly confusing and festooned with explanatory links to even more
> confusing pages. But, oh well.)

If you haven't caught it— my strongly held and long standing
recommendation is that we make the process as invisible as possible:
By overloading the cookie that is set when a user (inc. anons) edits
we can switch these people over to the draft-by-default view, either
in a full-on all-articles sausage making mode like a logged in user,
or just for the articles that they've edited.

(I know I'm being repetitive on this point, but I'm going to continue
making it at least until people start arguing that it shouldn't be
done rather than ignoring it or mistakenly believing that it isn't
possible)

After that is done you could decide to say absolutely nothing at all,
you certainly don't have to engage in the whole hopeless task of
trying to explain to a newbie that their edit is _still_ available to
the whole world but that it isn't yet the default view of the article.

I prefer the nothing at all route myself: Let the notice that appears
on the top of the draft version tell the story. At least by that
point, after seeing the edit live on the site—the risk that the user
will believe their edit has been lost forever down a deep dark hole of
review hell will be reduced.

Of course, there is the risk that the cookie will expire or the user
will browse from another before their edit gets reviewed... but thats
still less bad than the common case of an over zealous vandal fighter
reflexively reverting the user's edit so that its gone for good.