Page Status Indicators

Hi, folks–

Last night, Eliezer Bernart (eliezerb) tackled one of our big 
outstanding actions (with my modest guidance): the page status markers.

JuLee encouraged Eliezer to learn Semantic MediaWiki templates, given 
our dwindling resources there, and he really dived in. He asked for a 
specific task, and I suggested that he look at the outstanding flags issue.

As background, we've already discussed that many people find the large 
number of flags on a page (and their presentation) as intimidating and 
discouraging, both for reading and for editing. We had general (though 
imperfect) consensus that we should simplify the flags.

On a related note, we also wanted to make sure sure that readers knew 
what content they could trust, and what was less complete or reliable. 
This dovetails with the initial goal for flags.

Eliot proposed the following set of minimal flags to reflect the various 
content statuses:

* Unconfirmed import
* Needs review
* Missing Content
* Deletion/Move candidate
* Contains Errors

We agreed that this is one of the tasks that we needed completed before 
we announced the CSS milestone.

Eliezer has run a test on the flags template in the /test wiki, removing 
the unwanted flags. If a page has any flags checked, it will show on the 
page [2]; if no flags are checked, it will not show any flag markers 
[3]. Once we get the wording settled, this should be a clear indicator 
of a page's readiness (or unreadiness).

You can also see that this is much less intimidating to edit [4].

Eliezer noted that if we change the flags template in the main wiki, we 
will lose all of the existing flags; I think this is unavoidable. He 
also explained that while he can set a flag as checked by default (e.g. 
"need review") for new pages, existing pages can't have any flags 
checked by default; so, we will need to find a way to efficiently check 
the "need review" flag for all pages we aren't confident about, so we 
can highlight the readiness of the CSS and certain API pages (maybe we 
could use a script to do this auto-checking?).

I wanted to confirm with the community that this is the path we want to 
follow. What do you all think?

Next steps:
* clarify the wording used, to indicate that a page is not yet ready
* settle on the visual appearance of flags (not critical, but nice to have)
* deploy the new flags template on /wiki (the main content site)
* make sure unready pages have a flag checked, and that ready pages are 
free from flags
* rewrite the Getting Started and Editor's Guide pages to reflect the 
new flag statuses, per Scott's concern [5]


Thoughts?

Also, a big thanks to Eliezer! We should blog / tweet about this minor 
milestone.


[0] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webplatform/2013Jun/0169.html
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webplatform/2013Jun/0172.html
[2] http://docs.webplatform.org/test/css/properties/border-radius
[3] http://docs.webplatform.org/test/dom/methods/getElementById
[4] 
http://docs.webplatform.org/t/index.php?title=css/properties/border-radius&action=formedit
[5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webplatform/2013Jul/0005.html

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 2013 20:57:20 UTC