Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Editing/Ping users from the edit summary

Ping users from the edit summary

  • Problem: I recently saw a person wondering how to notify someone of a change, without necessarily leaving a message on the chat page.
  • Who would benefit: Every editor
  • Proposed solution: The solution would be to allow notifications when a user page is linked in a change summary.
  • More comments: A recurrent subject, which has not yet been resolved. It doesn't seem so complicated to implement. There would surely be some details to review, such as revert messages that send useless pings.

Discussion

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I agree it is very time consuming to try and communicate with every editor/user one encounters. Even sending thanks can be cumbersome. There are also other reasons users are reluctant to post on a talkpage. Ottawahitech (talk) 14:50, 18 November 2017 (UTC) Please ping me[reply]

There was a similar request on the huwiki village pump (where we were collecting ideas for the wishlist) for pinging users from the FlaggedRevs review summary (the optional comment field when you mark an edit as reviewed). --Tgr (talk) 06:40, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Framawiki: do you have any idea how this should work? The summary field is already short and I am hesitant to support a proposal which can shorten it even more. Perhaps a secondary field for names of pinged users? --Vachovec1 (talk) 21:32, 27 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"The summary field is already short" It is planned to deploy allowing for longer comments very soon (this was worked as part of a previous year wish), so that should not be a large concern. --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 15:40, 28 November 2017 (UTC)::to propose a new field, why not. I don't really see the benefit.[reply]
Vachovec1: To propose a new field, why not. But I don't really see the benefit to add something else to this well complicated system. For how to implement this, it is also possible to manage this after the vote, or let the team decide :)
The only problem I see with the implementation of this idea, which has already been written somewhere, is the risk of edits escalating, which would be a means of discussion. But it seems fair enough to me. --Framawiki (talk) 21:08, 28 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Since one of the comments below mention this, I would suggest that we integrate this with the way in which we have proposed support of "hashtags" as well in edit summaries: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123529 . The idea being that edit summaries could be a tool for tracking both relationships to individuals activities (hence the ping suggested here), or to larger campaigns of activity (i.e. a WikiProject, event, or editing campaign in the vein of WikiProject Women in Red). Making the edit summaries more "connected" with the activities throughout the ecosystem -- would make it much easier to build tracking and coordination tools, to help folks feel like their work is part of larger efforts. Sadads (talk) 13:52, 1 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • Note that some projects has banned polemic in the summary field, and allowing discussions with other users in the summary field would go against this. That said I believe this is a bad idea in general, as notifying other users should be part of the general notification structure. A small number of predefined notifications could be sent to other users that has the page on their watchlist. They should be predefined, otherwise the total workload increase as the messages must be wetted. — Jeblad 23:17, 10 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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