User talk:Svito/Ramblings

Editing workflow and permissions

I've been thinking to create this topic for a while, but as of suggestion to create additional user groups I've decided to lay down some infrastructure issues I perceive existing but not discussed yet.

To start with something, here are the areas I see important for a wiki success:

• Accessibility - everybody can contribute
• Convenience - contributing is as easy as possible
• Quality - edits are reviewed by peers

Some issues I noticed with implementation of those:

• Accessibility - some people are banned permanently (not unwarranted) for simply not knowing better and resorting to bikeshedding after their changes were reverted and complained about, understandably having many of your changes reverted can be tough pill to swallow, especially if you firmly believe what you do is right
• Convenience - you have choice you don't want to make and consequences you don't want to face:
  • Make changes to article directly - be uncertain whether peers agree your change is good and if you will be criticized for them later
  • Open discussion: often peers don't have enough of an opinion on the subject or discussion reaches dead end, loss of interest
  • Make draft in user namespace: invest more time copying and pasting to bury with discussion and lose interest
• Quality:
  • Some good changes rot in discussions and user namespace, protected wiki articles suffer because it is not convenient to propose changes
  • Some low quality edits go unnoticed for some time or require discussion to revert

What I see as potential ways to solve those issues:

• Mandatory peer review to prevent low quality or not discussed edits
  • Clicking save changes does not publish it to the original article, but creates a "merge request"
  • Exceptions are made to Arch Linux staff and "article maintainer" that is trusted to make good edits on that topic
• Convenient and accessible peer review - anybody can easily see and reach unpublished edits and leave a comment or possibly press [thumbs up] equivalent to let OP know his work is appreciated and seen, alternative to complete silence
  • Maintenance team responsible for merging edits, ideally with single click

-- Svito (talk) 17:23, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

I think MediaWiki is really limited in regard to editing workflow. Experimenting with large article changes requires you to copy the article to a user page. These changes then however cannot easily be merged back into the original article. Verbally announcing complex article rewrites without having concrete proposed changes also hinders effective discussion. Compare this to GitHub where you create a pull request, everybody can see the proposed changes and comment on them, allowing you to revise your pull request in your branch and if the maintainers agree, the pull request can easily be merged, retaining the individual commits with their messages. --Larivact (talk) 06:52, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Canonical names and redirects

• Article can have multiple valid URL queries.
• Page name does not have to be dictating canonical URL as the only one.
• Canonical URL should not be tied to article name as this effectively harms accessibility. Canonical URL should be preferably short as possible, not require modifier keys to be typed. This should not be fixed later with redirects and guidelines but be essential to article creation and supervision.
  • Example: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture with wiki.archlinux.org/alsa for canonical URL.
• You should not be notified about reaching page with other URL query than canonical.
• Redirect should not obfuscate previous page history. Previous page history either has to be integrated in target page or separated under another URL. -- Svito (talk) 11:41, 30 August 2018 (UTC)