Grants talk:IdeaLab/Edit annotation

Support

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Public comments?

Hello. Would the ratings be public or private? If multiple people rate one edit, will their scores be added? Can the rating be changed? PiRSquared17 (talk) 04:42, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

• PiRSquared17, public. Gryllida (talk) 07:25, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Yes (mean, or sum, it's an open question). Gryllida (talk) 07:25, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Only by providing new rating, similarly to how if you warn a vandal but later realize his edit was constructive, you don't remove the previous warning. Gryllida (talk) 07:25, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Possibly related ideas

Just throwing a couple of things I found related. We might be able to learn something from them, especially regarding the technical implementations and discussed but unrealised ideas there.

• Wikiquality#Revision tagging talks about quite a similar idea. Some parts of it were realized as Flagged Revisions, where edits are assigned by a reviewer with a couple of labels (minimal, good, etc), or rejected.
• Revision tagging (mailing list discussion) talks about mostly simple metadata (which device/tool/script was used to make the edit, etc), and technical requirements on the server-side. Possibility to allow editors change tags assigned by AbuseFiler has been discussed (bugzilla:28213).

--whym (talk) 06:00, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. ☺ I have added a mention of the first of these two in the text of the idea. Gryllida (talk) 08:37, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

General feedback

It's unclear when and how the "Message shown to contributor" appears. You need a diagram of it. Your bullet list of "Message shown to contributor" is garbled, it ends with "Informati". You use passive voice for "edit may be undone", how would that work?

I think it's a non-starter to have these messages in a new system. We have talk pages and notifications and watch lists, adding another list is too much. Speaking of additional systems, Article Feedback Tool v5 has an entire moderation system for article feedback comments. This proposal should acknowledge that and learn lessons from it. I think one lesson from AFTv5 and Flow is whenever you let someone create a message on a wiki, it has to be public, it has to hook into all the functionality of watch list/recent changes/user contributions/blacklist and antispam, and it has to provide moderation facilities. Just saying "users can dismiss annotations" is nowhere near sufficient.

I'm not involved with Wiki disputes, but creating a private backchannel through which editors can spam and harass each other seems prone to abuse. So again the comments have to be public, which is what I'd expect an "annotate" system to do. One way it could work is comments live in the diff view and the author of the revision is notified of them in Echo. When a third party reviews the diff, she sees there's been an annotation. That could work at a first level, but then how does the author or a third-party respond to a comment with "Addressed in my new edit?" or "I disagree, perezhilton is an authoritative source"? Does all that go in the diff view? You're now rebuilding mw:Gerrit in revision history; I'm sure someone has proposed such a thing for MediaWiki edits :-)

The obvious Talk page integration (whether current talk page or a Flow board) would be an easy way from the Annotate dialog to create a new thread "Discussion of revision of 2013-12-27T02:28:33". This would provide a place for discuss annotations, make the conversation visible, etc. (note there's a Flow use case for some day allowing voting and achieving consensus on a thread, e.g. for an Undo decision) Maybe there's already a gadget for this. But then why don't we build this Talk integration first, and only then see if we need either the direct user-to-user feedback in this proposal or my variation that puts the annotation feedback with the diff? You mention "Talk pages: not clogged" as a benefit of a dismissable message to a user, but creating a new message system just spreads the clogging out.

Cheers, I'm sorry my thoughts aren't more coherent. -- S Page (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

• S Page (WMF), thank you for the detailed feedback. Gryllida (talk) 06:08, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• «I think it's a non-starter to have these messages in a new system.» — right, this proposal is not for real work. It is in Idea to evolve. ☺ Gryllida (talk) 06:08, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• «Just saying "users can dismiss annotations" is nowhere near sufficient.» — I have seen many many times when a generic template, such as «!! DO NOT HARRASS OTHERS OR YOU WILL BE BLOCKED», caused very adverse reactions of contributors who were only a bit unstable otherwise. Originally when writing I thought they should be allowed to hide them similarly to how they can do to fundraising banners. … You are right, this thought is clumsy and redundant for this idea, where feedback is already interactive and human.
• «So again the comments have to be public» — absolutely. If you see a way to make this more clear in the text, go ahead; I have added a few bits about that. Gryllida (talk) 06:08, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• «But then why don't we build this Talk integration first, and only then see if we need either the direct user-to-user feedback in this proposal or my variation that puts the annotation feedback with the diff?» — good question. I claified that my original idea was to attach the new thread to 3 things — edit author talk, article talk, and the diff — in each of which it could be visible. Gryllida (talk) 06:08, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• I might expect some of this idea to be integrated in, in the first place, Flow (and new bits to Echo as people would have a new item to be notified of, feedback to their edits). I apologize for being unclear in the original documentation and hope that my answers have helped understanding. Gryllida (talk) 06:11, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17, S Page (WMF), I have rewritten the idea in an attempt to improve its readability, coherency, and clearness. Please take a look and share your thoughts, if you like. ☺ Gryllida (talk) 16:24, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Questions

Granular thanks

Non-granular thanks

The thank feature is mainly there to keep note of useful edits by a contributor who vandalized in the past, to account for them when he vandalizes a second time. Such tool behaviour has abuse potential (vandals making edits that could be considered useful to get away with future vandalism). Gryllida (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank granularity

• Should there be only one button without 'undo'? Gryllida (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Or should there be a scale ('do not undo', 'thank', 'thank much')? Gryllida (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Need to utilise the thank count for the vandal functionality of this tool

• Probably there is no such need? Gryllida (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• If there is a need, how exactly would the contributor's edit counts add up? Gryllida (talk) 16:27, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Need in thank feature

• Should the thank feature be there at all? Gryllida (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Vandalism warnings

Version 2

Version 3

I oppose making vandalism warnings this automated. English Wikipedia already has issues with people being too aggressive in warning new users which may hurt editor retention. I think retention is a higher priority problem than vandalism at this time. --Pine^✉ 22:16, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Acknowledged, and I will try to refocus the idea on comments more than on automating anti-vandalism; more people having their say in this section could be useful. Gryllida (talk) 23:52, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I have rewritten some of the text and changed the interface sketch accordingly. --Gryllida (talk) 01:08, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks, that is an improvement. I suggest asking the WMF editor engagement team for their input. --Pine^✉ 01:04, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
  • A useful idea. ☺ How do I do that? Gryllida (talk) 02:16, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Complexity

• This tool makes the editing interface more complex. I have reservations about increasing complexity unless there's a significant benefit, and in this case I think the cost of complexity outweighs the benefits from the improvements. We could think about how to get benefits similar to what's proposed here if there's a way to do it while limiting complexity. --Pine^✉ 22:16, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
  • After a rewrite there is not as much complexity in this revision. It appears to mostly do existing things and serve as a bridge between diff viewer and user talk page. Gryllida (talk) 01:09, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
    • Thanks, the simplification is also good although I remain cautious about adding this tool. --Pine^✉ 01:06, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
      • Thank you. Please feel free to read it "in a few days" and criticize in more detail. Healthy criticism is encouraged. ☺ Gryllida (talk) 02:16, 2 January 2014 (UTC)