Community Wishlist Survey 2023/New contributors/Add notice to Visual Editor that unsourced edits may be reverted

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Add notice to Visual Editor that unsourced edits may be reverted

  • Problem: There is no notice in the Visual Editor that unsourced edits will be reverted. Users who use the Visual Editor are likely to then publish edits that are then reverted because they were unaware that adding a source was required.
    Such a notice is already present in the Wikitext editor ("Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable through citations to reliable sources.")
  • Proposed solution: A notice in the "Publish changes" dialogue of the Visual Editor that states that unsourced edits will be reverted.
  • Who would benefit: New contributors and patrollers
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T300942
  • Proposer: Lectrician1 (talk) 06:30, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • @Lectrician1: Thank you for adding this proposal! This seems technically straightforward and clear to me.
I suppose the only question is if other community members agree that this text will help new editors. As with all new editor onboarding, it's a balance between providing enough direction and keeping guidance concise enough to ensure it's clear and not overwhelming for newcomers.
This wish sounds somewhat related to an Editing team project called Edit Check T265163. One idea the Editing team is exploring is around surfacing guidance within Visual Editor when an editor is adding text that likely needs a citation. This in-the-moment direction might be more likely to be read by new editors and prompt a change in behavior. I don't believe this wish conflicts with that work; perhaps both ideas are worth considering?
Thanks for adding this wish and thinking about onboarding new editors! --KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:15, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • The wikitext editor shows that message along next to the save button. The equivalent place in VE is the save dialog, where the copyright notice is more verbose and less informative. That would be trivial to improve, either in the software or as an on-wiki interface message override. --Tgr (talk) 07:11, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I also think VE should add notice that unsourced content may be removed because in the source editor, we already have a notice. However it is hard to think of a place to display the message. Thingofme (talk) 14:58, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • w:en:MediaWiki:Editpage-head-copy-warn says that content must be verifiable, but it does not say that not including citations will result in being reverted (as opposed to, e.g., someone collaboratively finding and adding a source, or someone tagging the material as needing a citation [assuming that it actually does need one]). It would be important for any such statement to be accurate, which could be very difficult to generalize across the varying practices of all the Wikipedias. This statement about verifiability does not seem to appear at the other Wikipedias, and it does not apply to most of the non-Wikipedias. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:20, 14 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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