When making an edit at English Wikipedia with the source editor, the w:MediaWiki:Editpage-head-copy-warn notice appears at the top of the page, warning that "Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Any work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions." The last sentence is just a disclaimer, but the first two communicate really important information. However, this notice is entirely missing from VE. This is especially problematic given that newer editors, who most need to hear the warning, are also the ones most likely to use VE. Is there a space in the VisualEditor editing environment where we could add this notice or something similar?
Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback/Flow
Sorry about not replying sooner.
I don't think there's an easy spot to add that warning, but I wonder:
- Warnings that display when you open the page are more intrusive in VisualEditor (including the 2017WTE). You have to click past them before you can start typing. Do you want to click past that every single time you open a page to edit? I don't.
- Is there any reason to believe that newcomers have a different rate of copyright violations depending on which editing tools they're using? Past research has suggested that newcomers using the visual editor are less likely to be reverted, which hints that it might not make any difference.
The text in the notice was updated the other day as a result of this discussion, so it's now a lot more concise, which means I'd like to see it show up in VE all the more. I don't think it's good that editnotices are more prominent in one editor than the other—they're just as important for each and should show up the same.
(It's not technically an edit notice, I thought?)
Presumably the actual goal is to avoid copyvios and get citations added, rather than to display a particular bit of text, right?
I'm not quite sure what it is technically, but that's somewhat immaterial to the non-technical consideration.
And yeah, that's certainly the point. Could you clarify what you're asking or saying there?
For the last several years, this specific message has been shown to editors using one tool, and not to editors using another tool.
The expectation is that this message would result in fewer reverts. However, the reversion rate is slightly lower in the people who don't see the message. That fact suggests that this message probably doesn't reduce copyvios or increase citations. Therefore, adding that message probably won't achieve the actual goal.
It's still a good goal. The question is what could be done that would actually achieve the goal. Maybe a proper how-to-edit onboarding system?
That's confusing correlation with causation—the revert rate is presumably lower in VE because it's easier to use, but it might be lower still with the message. We don't know. I would love to see a proper large-scale A-B test that would give us some data to work with. Would you support that?
I'd be happy to A/B test the world.
Theoretically, it should be possible to check past edits to determine which editing environment is more likely to result in the addition of citations. Edits in the visual editor and its 2017 wikitext mode have always been tagged, and they recently added Special:Tags for the 2010 WikiEditor. You can see a list of available tags for editing environments at enwiki along with an estimate of how often they were used last month (all namespaces).
My guess is that mainspace edits in the visual editor are more likely to add ref tags than any of the wikitext editors, and that mobile edits are least likely from any of the general editing tools (e.g., excluding HotCat, which isn't supposed to be adding citations). You would probably also want to exclude any edit that was tagged with "Undo" or "Manual revert". It would probably make sense to check edits only for relative newcomers, since experienced editors are expected to already know such basic things, even if it's not there in the interface.
The reason that I would expect the visual editor to be more likely is because it already has a built-in system to encourage both links and citations.
I'd certainly be interested to see A/B data on VE vs. other editors, but that wouldn't answer the pertinent question here, which is not which editor is best, but whether or not it helps to have the universal editnotice. Data that editors do better with VE wouldn't answer that, because we don't know whether it's because of the lack of universal editnotice or (my guess) just because VE is easier to use. Regarding "built-in system to encourage both links and citations", I'd say VE makes it easier to add sources but not that it encourages them. I could open a page with VE, add a new entirely unsourced paragraph, and click publish without it anywhere telling me that I'm doing anything wrong (see w:Wikipedia:Making editing easier 2021). But let's stay focused here.
You're assuming that what you, an experienced editor who has made 75K edits, see is what a new editor sees, which is not true in this case.
If you're a new editor, the link and cite buttons in the toolbar have glowing blue dots on them. When you click on the blue dots, you get a friendly explanation about why you should make links and cite sources. Try opening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random?veaction=edit in a private/incognito window, so you can see what new editors see.
In effect, for the question of references, we're already running a natural experiment, between a banner in the old wikitext editor vs glowing blue dots in the newer ones. I suspect, but have never tried to find out for sure, that the blue dots work slightly better.
Ah, thanks for pointing that out. The blue dots are certainly helpful, and might suffice as replacement for the editnotice, although I do note that what I said above (that I could add unsourced info and never be told I'm doing anything wrong) remains true.
Regarding the popups, a few thoughts:
First, I'm not sure it makes as much sense to have the links one as it does the citations one. I feel like most newcomers have read Wikipedia (and the rest of the internet) enough to know that links are good, and the link icon is an intuitive place for the option. There is some value to it, but if it distracts from the much more important notice about citations, perhaps it should go.
Second, neither of the popups have any "learn more" link, which closes out the option for more competent newcomers to answer questions like "which terms should I link?" (answered here) or "which sources can I use?" The citations one doesn't even mention the idea of reliability, let alone link to a page like w:Help:Introduction to referencing with VisualEditor/5. I do get that there's a very limited amount we can ask newcomers to read, but if we don't even attempt to get across reliability, it means that a substantial number of editors are going to be reverted, which leads them to give up.
Lastly, I like the images a lot. Could they be uploaded to Commons so that we can use them on pages like the referencing one above?
An editor has already uploaded those two images as File:VisualEditor tool reference-ltr.png and File:VisualEditor tool link-ltr.png.
You only need to be told about citations if you are adding content. At least at enwiki, that appears to be a minority of edits. If you are copyediting, you might benefit from a reminder about links. Help:Growth/Tools/Add a link is a more heavyweight approach to teaching newcomers about the ideal approach to links.
The existing text mentions citing books, newspapers, and websites. I think this covers most situations. Volunteer-me has been in several discussions recently in which editors have attempted, and failed, to define "reliable sources". We do not even seem to have a widespread agreement any longer that a source can only be declared reliable wrt to the specific content it is supporting, and that therefore there are no "always unreliable" or "always reliable" sources (although there are some that are close enough to always-unreliable that the distinction is unimportant). Work-me would not necessarily recommend that the English Wikipedia's definition be hard-coded into software, but I would really not feel comfortable trying to have the software define reliability when there is no community consensus on what a reliable source is. (NB: "what it is" is not "how you determine whether this one is reliable").
Re images, ah cool! Sorry that got missed when I searched on TinEye. Higher resolution copies would be ideal but that's not crucial.
Re most edits not being content additions, true, but we have a pretty good idea of when an edit is likely to be a content addition, and I think there's more we could do to prompt aggressively in that circumstance.
Re the definition of reliable, I agree that there are varying interpretations among editors, as is inevitable for a project like Wikipedia, but I think I perceive more of a consensus than you do—w:WP:V and w:WP:RS are two of the most well-established PAG pages in all of projectspace. And even if there are questions in borderline cases, the more common use case for newcomers is stuff that's pretty clear, like citing IMDb.
Concretely, the two changes I'd like to propose, given our discussion, are:
- That we add a link to w:Help:Introduction to the Manual of Style/4 for the linking popup (either over link important words or as a new line with Learn more)
- That we change the text and linking for the sources popup to this (additions bolded): Improves your content by adding sources of reliable information. You can cite from reputable books, newspapers, and websites. (Except if we do the link as a "learn more" line, in which case we'd do that here, too).
I see that the lines are encoded at w:MediaWiki:Cite-ve-dialogbutton-citation-educationpopup-text and w:MediaWiki:Visualeditor-linkinspector-educationpopup-text, so I'll go ahead and make the suggestions there, although I'm not 100% sure if they will be able to handle the links without technical help.
@Xaosflux knows how to make such changes.
Volunteer-me would feel compelled to quibble over the "reliable information". Wikipedia does not contain "reliable information"; it is meant to contain "verifiable" information. Also, as a practical matter, if a new editor is getting their information from garbage sources, we (volunteer-we) actually do want them to tell us that. Tripping the spam filter, or activating Cluebot, or having a RecentChanges patroller promptly revert the change because it comes from a popular garbage site is a good outcome. Encouraging people to hide their sources because they don't feel "reputable enough" is not a good idea.
I left notes on this at enwiki message talk; need to check in to the details and will let you know if it will require dev work or not. As far as the English Wikipedia is concerned, in general the community wants "verifiable information" from "reliable sources" - that does not mean the information is necessarily reliable, and the general disclaimer warns readers that articles are not necessarily accurate or reliable.
Note: those -educatinpopup-text messages do not currently support wikitext or html. As far what the message should say on enwiki, discussion should continue there. Xaosflux (talk) 20:45, 8 January 2022 (UTC)