[WikiEN-l] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> The message currently delivered by the software is:
> "Edits must be reviewed before being published on this page. "
>
> And yet the edit will be instantly available to every person on earth
> (well, at least all of the people who can currently access Wikipedia)
> the moment it is saved.   The interface text is misleading. It is not
> a good example of transparency at all.
>
> If I knew how to fix it, I'd suggest alternative text.  Sadly, I
> don't— I think that any message which conveys all of the most
> important information will be too long and complicated for most people
> to read.

How about this.  No message on the edit page itself.  When they save
the edit, they're redirected to the draft page of that article, with a
message at the top saying something like "This is a publicly-viewable
draft, and will be shown to all viewers by default after review."
There's no need to mention it *before* the edit, is there?

Mentioning it after the edit shouldn't discourage contributions too
much.  To the contrary, if it shows up on the default page, they'll
probably be happier than now, knowing that someone took the time to
explicitly declare their edit worthy.  If it doesn't, no different to
them than if it was reverted under the current system.

I'm not sure that making the edit experience exactly the same as now
is best.  It would confuse people who view the page from another
computer shortly after editing, before the edit is approved, and
assume that it was rejected.