[WikiEN-l] Making it easier for the public to help out

Tue Nov 21 11:47:37 UTC 2006

On 11/20/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mmmh. I'm much more in favour of a solution that *isn't* {{sofixit}} -
> this is not just for people who don't realise they can edit, it's also
> for the substantial number of people who don't *want* to, but would
> vaguely like to help in some way*.

Well put.
> a) Click here to flag the article for attention [submit button]
>
> -or- (preferred)
>
> b) Leave us a message describing the problem, which will help us fix
> it [textbox and submit button]

Nice. This is a good solution to the "I'm willing to spare precisely 5
seconds of my time fixing your article" passerby.

> a) We make this an email-form. It gets routed straight to some kind of
> OTRS-like ticket system, which has fairly liberal access given to it -
> the point here isn't to make it "private", it's to make it easy to see
> what's been handled and when a backlog builds up.

Every second time I hear the word OTRS it's "OTRS is totally
overloaded, is there some way of taking the pressure off?" My
preferred solution (I think I mentioned it earlier) would be to place
a message on the talk page, and to link to it from some centralised
page. If done carefully, that centralised page could show which items
still need to be addressed. Bearing in mind of course that if a talk
page message *doesn't* get addressed immediately, it's not the end of
the world, it happens frequently as it is.

> c) The same as b), except it makes some kind of "mask account" do it,
> rather than just the edit being treated as coming from the reader -
> who, after all, may be banned unknown to themselves. It also ensures
> anonymity of flaggin, which may be seen as desirable.

Is anonymity desirable here? Why?

> These may require some kind of not-quite-MediaWiki implementation, but
> that would in some ways be good - we want this to be free of some of
> the mediawiki constraints, like IP-blocking and so forth.

What if someone uses this new mechanism to avoid their IP block and be
a pain? How would we stop them?

> I'm personally quite taken by a), since it would seem to scale better
> than a single page, but it has the detriment fewer people would handle
> it. On the other hand, it would ensure some level of privacy if, eg,

If someone is flagging a specific problem with article X, it doesn't
seem to make sense to me to send it only to a central repository.
Talk:X very much seems the right place, if not the only place.

> people started leaving personal info in their messages.

Yeah, that would be a problem. A sufficiently loud warning "Please do
*not* leave any contact information here - your message will be made
public." should be able to cover that.

Steve