On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote:
I filed this in Bugzilla so that we have a place to keep track of the
feature request:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23796
Erik pointed me to some earlier thinking on this subject that's been
floating around a while. Relevant bits of the thread are below:
Rob
-- Forwarded message --
From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org
Date: 2009/7/28
Subject: Fwd: OOB notices in articles
I saw the design mockups by Parul here:
http://usability.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Messages.pdfpage=1
We discussed this issue a bit earlier this year - Brion wrote a blog
post about the various kinds of out of band article notices here:
http://leuksman.com/log/2009/01/29/e-mail-scams-and-out-of-band-article-notices/
I responded with the suggestion below. This may well be beyond the
scope of the current project, but if we're going to start thinking
about this problem, it is a direction we may want to explore -
basically, a simple syntax to program an intelligent article
notification system that is reader-friendly.
-- Forwarded message --
From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org
Date: 2009/2/2
Subject: OOB notices in articles
To: Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org
Thanks for the blog post re: OOB notices. I think it's an issue which
we need to address soon, as it has implications for FlaggedRevs and
many other quality-related initiatives.
I think we need a mechanism which I will call, for the moment, the
Notification Box, or NoBo. The NoBo would accept, via MediaWiki code
or templates, information that's relevant about the currently viewed
page, and display it to the user in a customized fashion. The user
could dismiss all of these notifications, some of them, or none of
them.
So, the NoBo could capture the FlaggedRevs state of a given revision,
some NPOV warning an editor added, and even additional metrics such as
Luca's trust assessment ratings. It could also show editor-relevant
information such as the protection status. And of course it could
capture special warnings like the spam notice you mentioned. Ideally,
the user would just click a simple [X] link to collapse a warning or
information box, and the software would learn not to show warnings of
that type in their expanded form again.
So, in simple ASCII-art, an example of a page that's labeled as
unpatrolled by FlaggedRevs, and as NPOV dispute by an editor:
__
| (!) Unreviewed edits [x] |
| (!) Neutrality disputed[x] |
-
When one of them is collapsed, it could show as:
__
| (!) Unpatrolled changes [x] |
------
That is, there would need to be an indicator that further information
is available.
When both of them are collapsed, it would simply show as:
___
| (!) |
Clicking the icon would show the expanded version.
The icons could have at least three levels: information, yellow
warning sign, and red warning sign, used for different kinds of
messages. We could set defaults for collapsed/expanded state depending
on the seriousness level. When summarized to a single state, the most
serious icon would be shown. The text (Neutrality disputed) could be
clickable for further information.
There would need to be a mechanism, possibly through the MediaWiki
namespace, to define the various warnings in the different levels.
Ideally, to avoid clutter, there would be limits on the text size for
the displayed version. Cookies/JavaScript could be used to record
reader preferences.
Cleaning ugly templates out of the article body in en.wp would be a
nice side-effect. As an editor, I would add a function like
{{#notify:npov}}, probably through a template, which would feed the
NoBo. (This does not address the metadata-in-wikitext issue, though I
think that's a separate and solvable problem.)
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