Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

Process for creating redirects with VE is burdensome

15
Sdkb (talkcontribs)

The current process for creating redirects with VE is quite burdensome and unintuitive. You have to go to the page options menu, choose page settings, check the "redirect this page" box, type out the name of the page, click apply changes, then go through the publish page dialogue. Redirecting is something that is most often done when creating a new blank page, so it might be nice if, when looking at a blank page in VE, a shortcut to creating a redirect appeared.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

We wanted to make it more prominent, but as it was some experienced users complained that newbies were creating bad redirects. I think the current balance is probably fine.

Sdkb (talkcontribs)

@Jdforrester (WMF), do you know when that feedback was received? I believe we've only recently tightened up our patrolling of new redirects, so things may be better now than they were a few years ago. Courtesy pinging @Rosguill, who I believe is active in this area. In any case, two points: 1) the fact that beginners tend to make more mistakes than experienced editors seems like a bad reason to make workflows difficult for them and for everyone else on VE—the extreme endpoint of that line of thinking is that many VE edits are low-quality newcomer edits, so let's just disable VE. 2) If we ever want experienced users to start using VE, we need to make it work better with the kind of editing experienced editors do, which includes creating redirects.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

@Jdforrester (WMF), do you know when that feedback was received? I believe we've only recently tightened up our patrolling of new redirects, so things may be better now than they were a few years ago. Courtesy pinging @Rosguill, who I believe is active in this area. In any case, two points:

Around 2013, I think. When you say "we" I assume you mean the English Wikipedia given you don't state otherwise? This software is written for hundreds of Wikimedia wikis and thousands of non-Wikimedia hosted wikis; we don't make decisions solely based on local sentiment. :-) I vaguely believe that the pressure was from the French or possibly Spanish Wikipedias.

1) the fact that beginners tend to make more mistakes than experienced editors seems like a bad reason to make workflows difficult for them and for everyone else on VE—the extreme endpoint of that line of thinking is that many VE edits are low-quality newcomer edits, so let's just disable VE.

Indeed, and such arguments are put forward every month in different communities.

2) If we ever want experienced users to start using VE, we need to make it work better with the kind of editing experienced editors do, which includes creating redirects.

Yes, I agree. I'm just giving some context.

Rosguill (talkcontribs)

Not sure I have much special insight to this aspect of redirects, but I agree with Sdkb that VE is more difficult than raw for redirect editing, despite otherwise preferring VE for articles.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

The goal wasn't to make redirect creation fast for people like us. The goal is to help the less-experienced editors (that's 99% of them, compared to the four of us in this thread) be successful (e.g., actually create a redirect, and have that redirect point to an extant page).

Sdkb (talkcontribs)
Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Typing a code that you memorized isn't intuitive, either. What do you think would be intuitive?

Sdkb (talkcontribs)

What I suggested above—that when looking at a blank page in VE, a prominent button or similar provides users an option to create a redirect. The vast majority of the circumstances in which an editor would want to create a redirect occur when creating a new blank page, and many instances in which an editor is creating a new page are ones where they're creating a redirect, so it should make sense to provide a shortcut from that screen.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

One of the principles for VisualEditor's toolbar is that it's always the same. Some things might be grayed out, but they're always present. This would only used be used in a minority of edits, but it would be present every time, not just when starting a new page. At the English Wikipedia, a quick look suggests that about 12% of all new pages today were redirects. In the mainspace, it's a higher percentage, but some of these are created via scripts. Looking specifically at mainspace page creations in the visual editor, about 21% of them were redirects – at the English Wikipedia. The equivalent numbers are 9% for the French Wikipedia and 12% at the German-language Wikipedia. Perhaps redirects are created less often at non-English Wikipedias.

Sdkb (talkcontribs)

Sorry, I think I still need to clarify further. What I'd like to see is not changes to the VE toolbar, but rather to the editing window body. I envision something similar to the new empty talk page experience, where opening an empty page in the VE would present users with one button to create a new page and another to create a redirect to an existing page. (Looking farther ahead, I envision further refinements, such as the "create a new article" option asking what type of article you'd like to write and then providing relevant prefilled content.)

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

To revive this old thread: Are you thinking about a sort of Article Creation Wizard?

Sdkb (talkcontribs)
Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I think that needs a little more work, but it's not a bad start. I think some of it would be confusing. For example, if you want to write about your favorite book, most people won't know whether that's a "non-financial connection" or "none". Additionally, even if you know what's meant, editors have different views on where to draw the line. Many editors are happy to declare that you have a COI for any voluntary organization you belong to, and almost nobody is willing to declare that w:en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Scouting, almost all of whom are/were dedicated members of scouting organizations, have a COI for their voluntary organization of choice.

The Editing team has talked about providing in-editor advice à la Clippy for years. The problem is that it's a really really really hard problem to solve. There are some things that could be fairly straightforward (e.g., if the edit adds numbers, you can prompt for adding a ref; if a paragraph has no wikilinks, you can prompt for adding links), but the things that are most important require human judgement and vary from topic to topic. The kind of content that is necessary and apprpriate for the ==Plot== section of an article about a novel or a film is exactly the kind of writing that a smart tool would detect as non-encyclopedic content.

Sdkb (talkcontribs)
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