On 10/9/2010 6:15 PM, David Goodman wrote:
Still, it is more consultation than was had for some previous changes, but, when you propose tshowing the unreviewed pages only to reviewers. do you mean
I. Not letting anyone see an unreviewed edit unless they have reviewer status or, II. Showing the unreviewed pages _by default_ only to reviewers, but still letting anyone, logged in or not , see them easily if they want to
Perhaps the way Rob's mail was written wasn't clear because neither of these are on the docket for the November release. I'll take the blame for that; I was the proofreader because he didn't want to misrepresent what I wanted to do.
As to the first bit, I think there's some confusion as to my recommendation.
Currently, if a series of pending changes is under review by a reviewer, and you (or anyone) go to the pending changes list, anyone can see that the article is under review. I don't have a problem with that except that I don't think there's much value to non-reviewers by itself.
However, combined with my primary recommendation that feature - that we should include the name of the person doing the reviewing - we should hide the "under review" status from the general public since it is going to be extra clutter.
So, to be clear, we are not talking about altering the ability for users to read pending changes, only altering the ability for users to know that *someone else* is reading the pending changes.
That being said, I do feel strongly that the viewing experience should be the same for both logged in and anonymous users and the fact that it changes is simply wrong. Users (of all kinds) should easily be able to find and read the pending changes but that doesn't mean they should be shown them by default.
Currently, the behavior is:
* Anonymous users see the Accepted version by default * Logged in users see the Pending version by default
That is very plainly a bad design decision. It doesn't require a lot of burden on my end, either, to prove the statement "users hate it when the behavior of a system changes based on what is, to them, an arbitrary and vague set of rules."
That's to say nothing of the fact that I think it actually runs *contrary* to the expressed motivation for the feature in the first place. It's things like this that create a schizophrenia in the feature.
Either way, addressing that for November isn't on the table. What *is*, however, is surfacing in a more obvious manner that users are viewing a Pending version, or an Accepted version, and that, I think, can be done.