Editing Improvements & Changes

Go through Ask The Tropers and read through any query that mentions an Edit War. They happen a lot.

Here's a random example I found just through a quick browse.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jul 14th 2023 at 8:12:49 AM

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

Maybe have some warning show like "This may be an Edit War. Edit warring is automatically suspension-worthy. Are you sure?"

I like that.

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

Folks, if you want the moderation team to quit en masse, potentially swamping Edit Banned with way more algorithmically-discovered edit wars than are reported on any given day is a really good way to do it. Now, if we can do some kind of warning before an edit is submitted, that’s a pretty good idea.

Edited by Willbyr on Jul 14th 2023 at 7:30:30 AM

Are edit wars typically a back n forth multiple times thing?

Maybe I could add a detection when someone submits the same edit more than twice? So it’s definitely an edit war and won’t trigger unnecessary alerts? And then the notifications could just create a thread inside a new forum called “Potential Edit Wars” only for mods. Just an idea.

Keep in mind everything would be thoroughly tested before going live. And we could also push it live behind the scenes, see how many it’s detecting and if any are legit and then decide wether or not it’s good to push live. Nothing experimental ever gets pushed live here. At least not anymore.

Edited by kory on Jul 14th 2023 at 5:36:50 AM

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

I was thumbs-upping the warning, for the record. I did not endorse an auto-detection for edit wars.

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

That’s what I was thinking.

I have thoughts but no time ATM to get everything down.

I was just supporting the idea of an automatic flagging system, not an auto-suspension system. Some sort of alert, not just shunting users to EB in droves.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Don't see how it would result in "swamping Edit Banned" because auto-suspension was not proposed, the suggestion on that part was either reporting these to the mods to review (hard to say how frequent would it be without statistics) or at least labeling edits so others can easily notice anything ATT-worthy.

Edited by Amonimus on Jul 14th 2023 at 3:47:05 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I think a lot of assumptions are being made. These are just ideas and we don’t know if it will produce 1 edit war a day or 1,000. I wouldn’t push it live without knowing what it’s detecting and how many

Edited by kory on Jul 14th 2023 at 5:52:08 AM

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

Having the "edit war detector" run for a few weeks as something only the mods can see would be a start. See if there's too many responses, false positives or not, and whether it merits moving forward.

---

Would the WYSIWYG editor be optional? While I can see the merit for it being the default (though I'm on the fence about it), I very much prefer our current editor, where I can see exactly what's happening "under the hood" and what went wrong. WYSIWYG editors on other wikis are prone to glitches, and they also tend to hog processor power.

Discar,

I can either have it off by default or have an option within your profile page to switch it on or off by default.

Edited by kory on Jul 14th 2023 at 6:24:17 AM

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

Okay, now that I have a few minutes before we start Mario Karting...

I agree, the WYSIWYG editor, if/when it's ever implemented, should be be optional, either through your profile or the edit screen.

As for edit war detection:

• This was brought up in the off-site mod chat, and I said that I didn't think it was feasible. Something that can detect a simple add/remove/add or remove/add/remove chain sounds fairly easy on paper, but there's so much potential for how material could be changed in an edit war cycle, especially one as complex as some of the cases that have been reported in ATT recently, that I'm not sure that an algorithm could ever efficiently work.
• My reason for the previous concern is that, by the letter of the policy, edit warring is an immediate suspension. IF we do come up with an algorithm that can accurately find edit wars, then if we're holding to the policy, we're obligated to issue suspensions for confirmed cases. If, in the worst case, there are way more edit wars that the algorithm finds than are reported on any given day, and we issue suspensions for them, that means that much more work that has to be processed in Edit Banned. The thread is already swamped as it is; we literally can't handle much more of a workload.

So, while I don't think this is fundamentally a bad idea, I think there are changes that we need more immediately, like converting suspensions over to a system like Bugs or Wishlist. If we had that, then it could be easier to process a larger workload.

Edited by Willbyr on Jul 14th 2023 at 8:34:42 AM

Well, modside the switch is optional and is on the edit screen like this◊ so I assumed it would work the same way if it was pushed public. After all, it was public for short amount of time when it was first released years ago. It was never proposed as something that had to be mandatory as far as I know.

As for the edit war detector, I am fine with the way things are now (and I don't think such a function is needed) but I guess a test run would be fine if that's what people want.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jul 14th 2023 at 9:36:21 AM

Macron's notes

Something else that I was reminded to follow up on today that could be helpful is this old idea about having canned options for page tags. Still needs a lot of work, though.

Well either way I can add a warning if it detects the same edit submitted twice and for the detection I can simply log this information in a table and check it in every few days and see what we get. If it gives us crap or way too many hits, I’ll just leave it at the warning and remove it from the OP.

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

Being involved in the above, (yeah, that's dumb of me), I can definitely say the idea of telling the editor that they're going to break the rules would maybe help. Since repeated identical edits are pretty easy to pick up and an ounce of prevention and all that. Might at least cut down on the number of people who wind up in EB having apparently never read the edit war page, that seems to be a common thing.

Though something that comes to mind as potentially useful is some sort of misaligned formatting detector? A bit harder to implement than in HTML or BB Code, for sure, but it might be handy to be able to tell if there's some '' that doesn't have a matched closing pair, or especially folder tags.

Edited by RainehDaze on Jul 14th 2023 at 4:01:48 PM

Avatar Source

Definitely support the idea of a way to jump to the desired folder if it's feasible. I usually ctrl+f or "Find in page" on mobile, but anything to make it easier is a good call.

Couple ideas:

• For the editing toolbar, maybe an option for commenting/uncommenting lines would be nice. Would be nice for hiding ZCEs
• If we're going to make edit reasons mandatory, "Crosswicking" and "Added Example(s)" would be imperative
• Maybe a tool that lets you swap the text before the colon with the page title, then copy it to the clipboard? Getting a precise selection is difficult on mobile, and such a tool would facilitate easier crosswicking.
• I know an alphabetization tool has been brought up, but perhaps a possible implementation would be a dedicated page where you copy the chunk of text and the page will spit back out the ordered text, still allowing the user to review??
• EDIT: Also, if there's a way to catch an Edit Stomp and notify whomever edit was stomped out, that would be nice since they're easy to miss as-is.
• EDITx2: A pop-up if an editor adds something you normally wouldn't want on a page, such as YMMV in the trope list or disambiguation outside the Ambiguity Index. Might be easier said than done, however.

Edited by ANonagon9 on Jul 15th 2023 at 8:53:24 AM

Common edit reasons generally match Notifiers. Most commonly:

• Administrivia/Crosswicking.
• Not enough context.
• Misused.
• Misplaced, moving to the correct tab.
• Trope was cut/disambiguated due to cleanup.
• Fixing Indentation.
• Grammar.
• Natter.
• general clarification on work's content

If this tool page was longer, it'd give a better view what people generally put in edit reasons.

Edited by Amonimus on Jul 15th 2023 at 3:56:01 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Should we start a new thread to brainstorm these general edit reasons, or just collate them here and maybe put them in a folder in the thread OP?

Don't see a need to split-off while we're still on-topic and the discussion hasn't been very long.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Ya keeping everything in this thread is fine. I’ll just add the details in folders to the OP like the TLP thread.

Edited by kory on Jul 15th 2023 at 7:43:17 AM

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

Edit reasons for the drop-down added to OP by Willbyr. Let me know what other reasons need to be added.

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

Maybe if there's a way to select multiple fixes?

Would also include something for formatting work titles, fixing quote formatting, and null editing to fix ghost wicks.

So it should be a check box system instead of single choice dropdown?

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs