[WikiEN-l] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.


I like that a lot.  Best immediately viable option I've heard yet.