Thanks, Nick! I will pass on the news!

 

Kerry

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nick Wilson 
(Quiddity)
Sent: Tuesday, 18 August 2015 8:47 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities 
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Visual Editor experiment might have a problem ...

 

Hi Kerry,
IIUC, the original bug was https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109113 ("Can't 
successfully complete a second CAPTCHA in VisualEditor's save dialog") which 
started last Thursday, and was fixed this morning (and the fix should now 
already be deployed to the production wikis). It was only an issue if the first 
CAPTCHA attempt failed (but I know how common that can be!). Sorry it affected 
your training session. :(

I see that Whatamidoing already replied to your post at WP:VEF


Quiddity

 

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Sam Katz <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

No, you don't need CAPTCHA. You can use Honeypot. I think that would fix it.

 

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Jonathan Morgan <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

No, I'm not aware of any ongoing CAPTCHA work. There was a long thread on 
wikitech-l starting last December ("Our CAPTCHA is very unfriendly") that 
resulted in some Phabricator tasks and a wikipage. But I don't know of any 
active development plans.

 

By the way: Aaron's in transition (of the timezone variety) right now, so it 
may be a day or so before he's able to respond to this thread. 

 

- J

 

On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:53 PM, Pine W <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

I thought that someone was already working on CAPTCHA improvents, but I can't 
remember who, and I haven't heard anything recently which makes me wonder if 
this was de-prioritized.

J-mo, do you happen to know the status of the CAPTCHA work is, and who, if 
anyone, is active on that project?

Pine

On Aug 16, 2015 10:41 PM, "WereSpielChequers" <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

Hi Kerry,

 

there is an experiment going on that randomly opts half if new users into V/E 
and leaves half using the classic editor. That should account for why one of 
your newbies had been opted in but not the other.

 

Captcha when adding citations is a longstanding problem, we need Captcha on 
account creation to keep the spam bots at bay, but somehow it also applies to 
newbies adding external links as cites, so we have a software feature that 
doesn't effect the vandals but instead targets the best of our newbies. My 
suspicion is that if we could work out when that was introduced and then 
compare it to subsequent recruitment and retention we would find that this was 
one of the most damaging mistakes we've made. 

 



Regards

 

Jonathan 

 


On 17 Aug 2015, at 04:56, Kerry Raymond <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

I ran my first training session using the Visual Editor this morning and hit 
what appeared to be a show-shopping bug. It appeared that the two new users 
(thankfully I had only 2) could not create a citation. They found themselves in 
an infinite loop of Save Page with Capcha when they tried to create a citation. 

 

By the end of the session, I managed to refine the bug to a combination of “new 
user”, “new article” (although created by me, not the new users), and citations 
involving a live URL, duly reported at 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#New_users_unable_to_create_citation_with_a_live_external_link_in_it

 

Ironically it first happened on their newly created User Pages where we were 
practising our new Wikipedia skills because tackling “real articles”. Then on 
the “real articles” I had created earlier for them to use (a training approach 
that has the benefit of not unleashing a horde of angry watchlisters when they 
make some silly mistake, which occurs if you let new people make their early 
edits on “popular articles”). (Spot the pattern, both were new articles!).

 

Now if this had happened to a new user sitting at home, they would have been 
stymied. Because I was there to hold their hands in a training setting, I found 
a way around the problem by logging them in as me and we continued the training 
session on that basis (but not an option to the user sitting at home 
frustratingly typing in Capcha responses until they got frustrated and walked 
away).

 

So, Aaron, it may be that your research on the impact of the VE was impacted by 
this bug. I imagine that users affected would have eventually aborted the edit 
as they were unable to save, unless by chance they were able to realise that 
the problem was caused by their citation and either removed the citation and 
just saved the text changes. It’s hard to say what the likelihood of a new user 
being affected is, as the problem seemed to relate to the age of the article (I 
am autopatrolled so I don’t think the new articles would have any “might be 
dodgy” status flags on them, but I am not familiar with how that side of things 
works). 

 

Also, is this experiment (or one similar) currently running? It’s just that 
when we went into the Preferences of the two new user accounts to enable the 
VE, one of them already had it enabled (yet I had seen both new user accounts 
created in front of me a couple of minutes earlier), so there was no 
possibility that this was anything other than a default setting for one of the 
two users. I thought enabling the VE was normally strictly opt-in?

 

Kerry

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-- 

Jonathan T. Morgan

Senior Design Researcher

Wikimedia Foundation

User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> 

 


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Nick Wilson (Quiddity)
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation

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