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.pdf&page=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.) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
