Talk:Flow Portal/Editing comments

Argument
So the page says: "Using the current talkpage interface, it is possible for users to edit the posts of others, up to and including interleaving. From a user experience point of view, this is irrational (and, frankly, insane): a discussion medium does not work without the certainty that the comment you are replying to is genuine, and that your comment will not itself be tweaked or corrupted by others. Accordingly, the argument is for Flow to not permit modification of posts, with the exception of a user trying to modify their own contribution."

I'm not sure if I understand this argument. There's two things I find strange about it. The first point is that it doesn't matter who changes the comment after the fact, this still affects the genuineness of the comment. In my experience, it is not a third-party changing a comment that undermines the genuineness most commonly, but rather the original editor changing a comment in substantive ways is more common. Example: Editor A posts one thing, Editor B responds with an elenchus, and Editor A goes back and changes her original comment so that B's response no longer makes sense. If the undermining of genuineness is a good enough reason for removing the ability of editors to change others' comments, so too it is a good enough reason for removing the ability of editors to change their own comments.

Second (and this is far more minor): There already is a way to have (relative) certainty that a comment is genuine: Check the diffs. The argument needs the further premise that checking diffs is too burdensome for a well-functioning comment system.

When you combine these two considerations: If the goal of not allowing other editors to change one's comments is to avoid the need of constantly checking diffs, then the goal is simply not met. The fact that the original editors can still change their comments keeps this as a requirement, as this is significant enough such that there will still be a need to check diffs. --Atethnekos (talk) 19:47, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
 * If an initial post is altered, I believe there will be something like an "Edited by x" note attached (just as Liquidthreads currently has, eg Thread:Talk:Flow/Auto-archiving/reply (30)).
 * The discussion at this point is to determine in what circumstances, and how frequently, we edit each others posts. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I still don't see the argument, even with "Edited by x" notes. The same sort of consideration would apply even with such a note:  If the note is not sufficient in its contribution to certainty of genuineness when an editor modifies another editor's comment, so too would it not be sufficient when an editor modifies her own comment.  --Atethnekos (talk) 20:16, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
 * So, the argument is: yes, both of those things (editing by the initial author, and editing by other people) generate the same discovery process, but only one of those is expected behaviour for non-wikimedians. People tend to expect they can edit their own submissions, but not that others can - and I'd argue that actually even on Wikipedia, we tend to be pretty surprised when people make substantive changes. If you take a look at the use cases at w:en:WP:TPO, almost all of them are minor fixes (typos, signature misses, etc).
 * Personally I'm not entirely sure if I'm convinced by this argument - but it shouldn't matter whether I agree with the argument, in the sense that 'this makes things more complex' is self-evident. Editing the comments of others increases complexity. Now, what's important is that we weigh that against whether there are actual, substantive types of editing the comments of others that are important, common and wouldn't be allowed by Flow as it stands at the moment. That we make a decision based on accurate info about both the positives and negatives of each option. This page/discussion is an attempt to gather every plausible example of editing the comments of others, in the hope that we/I can evaluate how much they happen and whether we deal with them. If we find a situation where, actually, it's really important to have comment editing and we can't have discussions without that situation coming up, we can discuss nixing this idea. Ultimately this early development stage is about experimentation, trying to find what works, and what doesn't. If there's evidence this won't work, it won't work :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 1 October 2013 (UTC)