Gregory Maxwell wrote: > On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 6:20 AM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > >> If you want to know how Flagged Revisions feels from an unprivileged >> position, go to Wikinews and fix typos. I just did this on >> >> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Geelong_win_2009_Australian_Football_League_Grand_Final >> - check the history. I'm not an admin or reviewer on en:wn. >> >> What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live >> immediately left me wondering just when it would - five minutes/? An >> hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki - it felt like I'd >> submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at >> their leisure. >> > > > UI fail. > > There is no reason for you to know or care that your edit isn't being > displayed to the general public. It's being displayed to you, it's > being displayed to all the other editors, it's being displayed to > anons who click a link to see the latest. > I hope you won't feel bad about me saying that I most deeply and soundly disagree with the above view.
The thing that -- at the very least used to -- attracts newbies to wikipedia is the "positive astonishment" factor: 'What, I just edited this web-page, and everybody all over the world saw the result immediately! That can't be right, there has to be a catch somewhere! Wow, there isn't! That is what *really* happens! Awesome!' For this reason, I won't ever agree that being visible for in house 'editors' or casual folks sophisticated enough to check and see if there are new non-approved edits, as a default, is good universally, rather than as a last resort. > It's our own damn fault for making the UI say the equivalent of "NOW > YOU MUST WAIT WHILE OUR TRIBE OF ELDERS SCRUTINIZES YOUR PATHETIC > EDIT" … we don't have to do it this way, and we shouldn't do it this > way. > > The process can and should be made mostly invisible to casual editors. > Like I said, you don't want the process to be 'invisible' to casual editors, you want it to be *transparently open*. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
