Talk:Community Tech/Ping users from the edit summary

Oppose the implementation of this feature. It is disruptive to a collaborative project like wikipedia (Comments from °)

• The changing of a edit summary has been declined in the past
• user watchlists have been declined in the past
• the length of edit summaries is very limited and will only be changed for non latin language to allow the same number of letters already allowed in english summataries.

This feature will only be used by experienced users, scripts and bots. That is a very limited nummber of users, and this users have ways to notify other users on talk or user talk pages or with wikimail easily through tools or scripts. The recipients will often be new users who will not know how to respond. Basicallly the only straightforward way is to make an edit yourself, even if only a zero edit is needed. Even today summary length does often not allow to be polite or informative (espacially with reverts). The connection between a notified user and a message will stay in the history for ever (attractive to trolls) but actually only be seen in watchlists and recent changes for a short time. The notified user may see the ping months later, at a time the issue has long been resolved or obsoleted by other edits.

This feature gives even more power to already powerful users and opens a way to moraly pressure unexperienced users to make a response in the sense of the pinging user. The proposal got voted #2 because basically only the skilled authors, who are incidently the benefitors of it, did actually vote in the wishlist. More usual wiki authors will get alienated by yet another notification that comes out of nowhere and is difficult to respond to or handle.

Also you need to know, that there is ping and how to correctly invoke it (you cannot correct a invalid ping in the summary). Implemanting phab:T159908 would be of more use to the majority of authors (and also readers).

--𝔊 (Gradzeichen Diſk✉Talk) 12:13, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

@°: You raise some really good points here. (Personally I believe the semi-permanent status and high visibility of edit summaries will be a deterant for abuse, but malicious users always find a way...) Some of your concerns could be alleviated by deciding if this opt-in or opt-out and/or by considering some logic such as 'only users who have previously edited a page can be pinged from that page's edit summary'. We won't want to over-complicate this feature but The Anti-Harassment Tools team will be part of the decision making process on this feature as we certainly don't want to create new vectors of harassment. — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 02:00, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Pinging a user without connection to the page seems a minor issue to me. It can be handled by a bot, that scans recent changes and reports users, who do this regularly. More relevant is a ping to a user who actually edited the page before. I think of a bot, that searches random pages for an easily detectable spelling error, autocorrects, and inserts a summary like "[user:newuser11] I corrected your really dumb spelling error, don't do that again". --𝔊 (Gradzeichen Diſk✉Talk) 18:19, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@°: You wrote "the length of edit summaries is very limited and will only be changed for non latin language to allow the same number of letters already allowed in english summaries". That's not true. The new limit will be (most probably) 1000 Unicode characters for all languages as per [1]. The necessary schema change is still in progress and will not be finished until mid-January (possibly even later). After that, additional time is needed for testing the behaviour with the web UI. --Vachovec1 (talk) 00:57, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Feedback from Newbie

Great tool for the new editors to notify their mentors/influencer/leader or vice versa. Thank you. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jhalmuri (talk) 18:43, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Great to hear. :-) Thank you for your comment! — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 19:50, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Pipes

It says pipes will not be supported. I have not checked whether this just means that pipes don't render in summaries, or whether it also prevents a ping. Even if pipes don't render in summaries, I suggest they should still be recognized and still generate a ping. People may use pipes habitually (or by copy-pasting an existing piped user link), with a familiar expectation that it works for pings. We don't want people to be unaware that an intended ping was not generated. Alsee (talk) 04:32, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

@Alsee: We're discussing pipes and bots on Phabricator, I've just updated the wiki page to reflect our current project status. The argument against supporting pipes is that it is easy to hide a username behind an innocuous link, which could be abused to send useless notifications. You've perfectly described the argument for supporting pipes, and since pipe support is already functioning in beta we'll likely keep it. If it becomes overabused we can make changes later.

This project will not affect how edit summaries render anywhere — piped username links and other links will still display as links on recent changes, history, and elsewhere. — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 16:11, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Reverts to last edit by XXX

It should be disabled for edits like this, my user name (Superchilum) in that case has no reason to be pinged. --Superchilum^{(talk to me!)} 07:35, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

phab:T189819. Stryn (talk) 08:20, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

@Stryn: thank you! --Superchilum^{(talk to me!)} 09:27, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

I hate this tool

It's disruptive and annoying. Totally unnecessary. Now at ckb we have problems mentioning each other (it doesn't notify the users most of the time) and I believe it's a bug caused by this feature. Allow us to disable it or just roll back this "tool."--Épine (talk) 15:24, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

@Épine: Could you please give details about how ckbwiki is having problems with mentions? With more information I can file a bug report and we can look into fixing the problem. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

@Keegan (WMF): the ping template is having issues and we noticed that after the new update for this feature. @ئارام بکر: who is an active Wikipedian at CKB, brought it up first. I noticed that, looking through the recent changes, I have the same issue for most users.--Épine (talk) 16:12, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. @NKohli (WMF): the problematic template is here. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 16:42, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Keegan. @Épine: can you tell me exactly what the issues are? This feature is only issuing notifications to people if they have been mentioned in the edit summary. It does not touch the ping template in any way. Can you also provide me some example edits which caused the problem you're referring to? Thanks. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

I don't know if it's connected to the ping template or not, all I'm aware of is after this feature rolled out, me and the mentioned user have had problems getting in-wiki notifications notifying us we have been mentioned sometimes, not at all times. I would show you an example, but it's really hard to scroll down through the recent changes and find that specific mention, if it happened again I'll put the link here for you.--Épine (talk) 21:06, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

@NKohli (WMF): It happened again here. I was pinged but never received a notification. I found it through recent changes.--Épine (talk) 09:34, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

@Épine: that does not seem to have anything to do with this feature. This feature only adds ping functionality from the edit summary which is not the case in that instance. Looking at the template history (I think I'm looking at the correct place, hard to tell) it seems like there were a few changes made recently - that might be the cause. Otherwise you should file a ticket, like this one.

Does it work?

I tried notifying In ictu oculi in this edit, but I didn't get a notification. Is that supposed to happen? Jc86035 (talk) 14:41, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

@Jc86035: As I understand, you are saying that you mentioned another user, and did not receive a notification yourself. Is this the problem you are describing? That is intended behavior, the other user receives the notification. If this is not what you are describing, could you please provide more detail about what you did and expected? Keegan (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 27 March 2018 (UTC)