Editing Improvements & Changes

I mean, if someone misclicks on mobile but the edit is simple, I think it'd be easy enough to figure out that they made an error.

Adding "minor edit" to the list sounds fine.

Also the wiki already has "large edit" calculator because such edits are marked on Followed Pages, so some logic can be added to that.

Edited by Amonimus on Jul 18th 2023 at 10:09:06 PM

I'm in agreement of adding a "minor edit" option to the edit reason list, should they become mandatory.

What about making edits to sandboxes? How would they factor into the "mandatory edit reason" thing?

Edited by Excessive-Menace on Jul 18th 2023 at 12:11:51 PM

I don't think large edits require a mandatory edit reason, unless it happens to change a huge bulk of text.

As for sandboxes, edit reasons are to still be optional as they only serve as "testbeds" for Wiki formatting.

Edited by YourEternalTroper on Jul 19th 2023 at 2:14:58 AM

The problem with not enforcing mandatory edit reasons is the same one that plagues all things that are nice to have but often not essential: the people who really ought to use them more are never going to. So if they're just required, it's a tiny extra step that avoids all those "I forgot"/"thought it would be too much effort" cases.

If edit reasons become mandatory, would it be okay if the "Save" button was disabled until an edit reason is made? That way, no one accidentally forgets to put in a reason before finalizing their edit.

I think the idea was that you'd get a popup telling you to pick/enter one.

Regarding custom edit reasons, this could be done by having an "other" option in the list of potential edit reasons; it would then be up to the troper making the edit to clarify things. Talking of which, it might be a good idea if clarification was required on some of these edit reasons. For example, simply removing an entry and selecting "misuse" as the edit reason tells the reader nothing about how the trope is being "misused", so a short explanation would be helpful.

Also, entries often need to be reverted if a rule-breaking edit is made, so it might be a good idea if "reverting" was added to the list of edit reasons.

As for the "spelling/grammar" edit reason, I'm guessing "first come first served" would still apply in the case of disputes over different forms of English. So maybe an edit reason to cover this would be useful. At the very least, it could be incorporated into my suggestion for a "reverting" edit reason.

If edit reasons do become mandatory, Edit Reasons and Why You Should Use Them will have to be rewritten (although the addition of a checkbox on its own means the page has to updated anyways).

I am guess I am neutral on edit reason becoming mandatory and I am fine with a minor edits checkbox.

Emma appears to have deleted her account over this.

I actually agree with Emma—I don't think edit reasons should be mandatory, especially for stuff like adding entries. I also fear we will be turning people off by doing this—we're certainly going to get a lot of angry complaints from non-regulars.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jul 18th 2023 at 8:22:21 AM

I don't think it takes that much to add an edit reason especially if it's saved on your browser and if we have a minor edits checkbox it only takes a second to do. I am also fine with edit reasons not being mandatory although people having the option to not leave any edit reasons at all seems to be causing enough issues as it is.

I think my big concerns are

• A. I don't think we'd be benefitting much from forcing edit reasons on people (and I think the current notifier system works fine enough),
• B. We don't actually know if people will correctly use edit reasons (as in, people will remove an entry for one reason and then state another), and
• C. This is going to be such an unpopular change among the casual non-forum-using userbase that I fear we will get numerous complaints and possibly lose a ton of people on the site. We've already shrunk our numbers as is—I don't think we should risk shrinking it further.

I wouldn't go as far as to quit like Emma but I do think this is a very bad idea.

For B, we can still send people notifiers for that.

I think it's a little hyperbolic to assume that mandatory edit reasons will drive many people off the site. If people don't like the change, they can express that civilly and we make a compromise or roll the change back if it doesn't work.

Personally, I'm just fine with canned edit reasons + edit reasons being optional as that means we don't have to change policy regarding edit reasons (right they are encouraged instead of mandatory). If they do become mandatory, I am still fine with it.

My fear is people won’t be civil. I’ve seen other websites attempt big changes like this and fail. I don’t know of any other wiki actually where this specifically is mandatory.

I’m going to stop posting though as I’m tired and a bit on edge. When I’m calmer I’ll return.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jul 18th 2023 at 8:55:08 AM

Compromise: Mediawiki has a per-user option to give reminders when attempting to save an edit without an edit reason, which we have found very helpful on the various fandom wikis we edit (including but not limited to FANDOM wikis). This seems like something that will go over better than mandatory edit reasons.

I am, for one, completely baffled that the idea of "please click one of these boxes before hitting save" would be such a deal breaker to people. It's annoying once, but after that it's the sort of thing that's right there. Just dealing with the bizarre outcomes of CamelCase being used for links is more of a pain.

The idea of "it's so self evident what I'm doing and I'm only interested in adding things, so all the times people never use edit reasons if they don't have to but should don't matter" seems the antithesis of collaborative.

Edited by RainehDaze on Jul 18th 2023 at 2:02:27 PM

I just want to point out that the indentation edit reason is listed twice in the upcoming changes. Can't wait to see them!

Popping in to say I rescind my earlier concerns. I’ve been physically and mentally not feeling well this morning so I admittedly overreacted again.

I think I’ll just start using TV Tropes again when I’m feeling better.

My concern about mandatory edit reasons is that the people who can't be bothered to add one (where it's needed) won't bother to pick the right ones from a checklist either.

That said, a warning for an edit with no edit reason that significantly changes the size of the page (especially for significant cuts) sounds like a really good idea.

(Preview of edit reason would also be really useful)

Is there any scope to improve the way edit reasons link back to ATT or Forum threads? Say, a checkbox that gives you a second field to paste the URL into and then auto-converts that into a "See further discussion here" pothole?

(Maybe even show an extra icon on watchlist and history for edits that are linked in that way?)

And/or a warning for straight-up deletions. I can't say how common it is, but even if you can assume an addition is self-evident, the reasoning for a deletion could be anything.

Yeah, if the change tracking is good enough to see that a whole line is deleted (which it seems to be, looking at edit histories), that should be a good prompt for a warning/note.

For that I think we first need a system that checks changes before an edit it published, meaning adding a mediawiki comparison (either in editor, preview or own popup)

Edited by Amonimus on Jul 18th 2023 at 6:25:48 PM

A few thoughts:

1. On the note of "reversion" as an edit reason, I don't think that's helpful with explaining why it was reverted, but I would add a tag for "Ban evaders reversion" since that would likely be helpful to the people who work on that.

2. I'm in the camp that mandatory edit reasons aren't at all inconvenient if straightforward ones can be handled by a simple checkbox, and complicated ones should have a reason given anyway. If anything, I think more people will use editvreasons in the first place if it's made easier and explaining the self-explanatory is not made to look redundant. That said, if we're really unsure if things, we can disregard edit reasons for very small edits, or try to get more people in the conversation.

3. One thing that could be a great convenience feature would be to temporarily set an edit reason as default (for, say, 2 hours) to make something like wick cleaning a little bit easier.

Edited by ANonagon9 on Jul 18th 2023 at 12:32:36 PM

I can't speak for anyone else, but the only times I've either significantly revised an example, or simply deleted it is usually for one of the following reasons (commonly seen while editing):

Revision Reasons

• Either to correct, or update information in the example.
• To remove natter, complaining, or simply to condense the example (i.e. trim Wall of Text).

Deletion Reasons

• The deleted entry was not example of [insert trope].
• To remove shoehorned entries.
• To remove entries that are either misleading, or contains false information.

After which, I add the appropriate edit reason.

Edited by MiinU on Jul 18th 2023 at 10:26:15 AM