Topic on Talk:Flow/Interactive prototype

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Will it be possible to edit messages (both our own and others')? I couldn't find any indication of such in the interface.

Sven Manguard (talkcontribs)

From what was said during the office hours today, yes, certain groups (presumably local admins) would have the ability to edit other people's comments, but most users would not have that ability. Users will always have the ability to edit their own comments. Finally, whether it is the commenter or a sysop that edits the comment, the change will me logged/marked.

Staffer should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. (Testing to edit someone elses text... Mange01 (talk) 20:31, 15 July 2013 (UTC))

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Ok, sounds good enough, although it'd be nice to see the intended user interface for that :) I'd just add that probably requiring a sysop to edit someone else's comment would be a little overkill. I think something more akin to rollbacker, or editor would be more adequate.

Mange01 (talkcontribs)

Nice. I believe in this. But I want to be able to edit my own text, but prevent non-administrators from changing it, perhaps causing some kind of indication that the message is revised. That feature is a recent trend in social media.

Quiddity (talkcontribs)
Sj (talkcontribs)

I agree, that really shouldn't be called an "admin" action - it is a part of everyday wiki cleanup to move around or archive comments left by others in the wrong place, or left inappropriately. Making that right something that all editors or rollbackers have should suffice.

Waldyrious (talkcontribs)

Couldn't agree more.

Quiddity (talkcontribs)

I've added "(or other user-group)" to the documentation, per discussions. If one user-group is selectable, any user-group is selectable.

TMg (talkcontribs)

I would like to stress this a bit. I find it very strange that there is no "edit" action for all posts in the mock-up. There are lots and lots of reasons why an experienced user wants and should be able to edit posts written by other users:

  • Simply fixing a broken link.
  • Clean other markup and make the post more readable. For example add or remove newlines. Some users tend to put an empty line after every sentence. This makes talk pages ugly and confusing no matter what software is used and should be allowed to fix.
  • Move a post or parts of a post to an other talk page and leaving a "moved to" hint.
  • Top reason: What if I want to copy and paste parts of the wikitext an other user wrote to use it in the article? Or even simpler to look at it and learn the syntax.

Therefor, in my opinion it must be possible to edit all posts. At least for autoconfirmed users. All other users should have the possibility to show the wikitext of all posts like they have with every protected page.

Arthur Rubin (talkcontribs)

It is to be local Wikipedia option as to who is to be able to edit others' posts. Although WMF's initial concept was to be admins only, en.Wikipedia has come out strongly for all users.

TMg (talkcontribs)

What does "en.Wikipedia has come out strongly" mean? Do you have a link?

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)
TMg (talkcontribs)

Thanks. (And [Template:Fullurl:: there you have an example for editing foreign comments], I made your copied http link a short wiki link.) I hope we don't have to do the same poll in every local Wikipedia. For me this is very obvious. I can tell you the German users will vote identically for the reasons provided above. Maybe we have to do a poll if unregistered users should be able to edit posts made by registered users. But since it's a wiki and everything can be reverted there is simply no need to restrict editing.

Erm, by the way, how will the version history look like with Flow? I really hope you can do better than Wikidata (with it's millions of tiny edits nobody can track).

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

As far as we know, there will be no version history - at least not for the whole thread. Only the history of each individual comment can be queried. This is not what we understand by a wiki.

Jorm (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Perhaps you should explore the prototype some more; whole Topic history has been there for quite some time.

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

You're right, I missed the History option as it's located at a different place than in current talk pages, hidden under the Actions menu. WhatamIdoing informed us that there wouldn't be a per-board common history, just a per-comment history, thus my comment above.

Will this history be equivalent to the current page history? By this I mean whether it will provide: - several records for the same comment, in case the comment is edited more than once. - a diff of the exact content that changed during the edit. - direct "diff" comparison between two arbitrary versions of the Board, encompassing changes to several comments.

Jorm (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Go ahead and play around with it. Edit someone's comments; you'll see new entries are added when that happens.

I can't speak to how well the diffs will work (as that's a Parsoid thing) but I think actually the ability to page through historical changes may be more useful. We're doing a lot of looking at how to handle this - it's a non-trivial problem, one that WikiData has as well. I don't have a better answer for you than that, other than that I've seen a couple stabs at handling "visual diffs" float around.

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

"the ability to page through historical changes may be more useful"

It's certainly useful, I use it myself often. That doesn't preclude creating diffs of several comments at once. I use those often, too, for different purposes. I usually do the latter when I want to find out all that changed between two revisions, and the former when I want to know exactly what a user edited.

Visual diffs would be the final presentation step; the way to retrieve what can be sent to Parsoid to find diffs depends on how Flow stores comments, so it's directly related to how you can find all edits in a Board. Am I right?

Diego Moya (talkcontribs)

Excuse me, there's some misunderstanding here. I've tested the prototype again after a good sleep, and I still can't find a global history that will show changes made to all comments with the same owner Board, only the one that shows the history of a single thread.

You seem to be talking about Topic history, which is what I found yesterday. Per-topic history is not global per-board history. So, is it true what WhatamIdoing told us after all? A per-board history feature is not planned?

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