Should we require users to provide an edit reason for wiki posts?

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Even if I’m willing to provide it, I often forget to put a “reason” when I edit wiki posts.

Discourse only allows requiring it for all or none of the posts. The only option is a “grace period” where no reason is needed between edits:

I obviously prefer the field to be required with a grace period… but what do you think?

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Did you actually experience any cases when that would improve anything on this forum?

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When reviewing the editions of a community guide. But that’s the only case. I don’t know if anyone uses this function for anything else except for typos?

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I have. Accountability of your words.

This will probably be heavily skewed from my own personal experience (even though I’m sure I can’t be the only one who thinks like this), but the edit function is incredibly useful when:

  • We want to correct something we said that is proven to be inaccurate
    • Because, you know, we value accuracy here :smiley:
      • This forum definitely feels like a safe environment to “admit you’re wrong”
        • At least, a lot of us like to think that it is :slightly_smiling_face:
        • And maybe edits form a part of that…?
  • We want to change our wording, because the initial post was not received the way it was intended
    • Offensive (which is a slippery slope these days)
      • It’s amazing how offensive one can be these days, even when going out of one’s way to NOT be :stuck_out_tongue:
      • Let’s be honest, one of the most common uses of “professional language” is to make the other party feel dumb or inadequate (a rather Nihilist view, and definitely not the only view, but still valid :innocent:)
        • And this is partly why emojis are so valuable, giving context to how the post would be delivered if we could see their face.
          • Because without complete information, the human brain is shockingly talented at “assuming the worst”
          • And posts without context are usually read with an assumption of animosity, resentment, narcissism and nonchalance (sad, but more prevalent than I’d like to admit…)
    • Too Ambiguous
      • Wasn’t clearly defined in the initial post
      • Information was missing
      • Terminology was used incorrectly or ambiguously
  • We realised that we inadvertently included something in the post we should have redacted
    • Personal identifiers in the outputs of commands
    • Unnecessary descriptions about issues
      • “My ISP is X.”
      • “The country I live in is Y.”
      • Anything specific to a particular region/language/culture/group/etc that wouldn’t be universally understood by anyone at first glance
        • Referencing government department names that are specific to a particular region, as opposed to the function of that government department, erroneously assuming that it would be universally understood

But I have to admit that watching someone post, for lack of a better word, a straight-up attack/insult, only to watch them edit it multiple times, watching live on my screen as changes are made, and not be able to see their edit history; kind of exempts them from any accountability of their words/actions.

It is frustrating to see someone write something, and then watch it change upwards of ten time before your very eyes, almost as if watching the output of an LLM.

It might force people to take more time in their posts, proofread them, get their choice of language right, before sending.

From a server standpoint, it may also minimise the required space to store posts. I’ll be one of the first people to say that when you put something interactive out on the internet, it’s amazing how quickly something out there tries to break it.

A grace period of something like an hour (or up to 48 hours) to be able to edit without providing a reason would be useful in stopping people from editing posts months after posting (thus bumping them to the top) without providing context.

However, if the reason was a free-form text box (and you can just put anything in there, and nobody but the mods can call you up on it), there’s a chance that might not be any better than having no reason at all.

Just saying…

But requiring a reason for editing wikis (or even requiring edits to be approved by the original author) would be fantastic.

Otherwise “I deleted your guide because I didn’t like it” might happen…

And yes, I’m also genuinely surprised at how “rigid” Discourse functionality is… :confused:

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There is already a grace period of 10 minutes, after which all further edits are visible for everybody. I’m not sure if it only works for ordinary posts.

See also: Updating the original post is a problem for email users

I don’t understand. The existing visible edit history already provides that.

This doesn’t scale. The author should not be forever responsible for the post, they should have the right to free themselves from this duty.

Edited the title by adding “for wiki posts”.

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Definitely not.

Agreed.

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No.

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Alright, I didn’t put “for wiki posts” in the title because of the current discourse limitations. Now I have other examples where it is definitely not a good idea, like editing a title, changing the tags… and all the work of the mods that are obvious most of the time?

So now, unless discourse provides a way to target the first post of a community guide, I’m against my original idea too :slight_smile:

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This simply is not so.
None of these edits are visible to users who interact with the Forum
via email. This bears repeating.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.

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No, I mean actual links to posts in which somebody made an edit which made the post worse, without providing a reason, after the grace period.

What are you talking about? Above I linked to the discussion about the email users. In that discussion it’s explained that these users can see the edits made until the grace period:

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You said “after which all further edits are visible for everybody”. I
pointed out that further edits are not visible to email users, as is
clear from that thread.
I am sorry if this was not clear in what I said.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.