Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2016/August

Save/Publish
The Editing team is planning to change the name of the “ ” button to “  ” and “  ”. “ ” will be used when you create a new page. “ ” will be used when you change an existing page. The names will be consistent in all editing environments.

This change will probably happen during the week of 30 August 2016. The change will be announced in Tech News when it happens.

If you are fluent in a language other than English, please check the status of translations at translatewiki.net for “ ” and “  ”.

The main reason for this change is to avoid confusion for new editors. Repeated user research studies with new editors have shown that some new editors believed that “ ” would save a private copy of a new page in their accounts, rather than permanently publishing their changes on the web. It is important for this part of the user interface to be clear, since it is difficult to remove public information after it is published. We believe that the confusion caused by the “ ” button increases the workload for experienced editors, who have to clean up the information that people unintentionally disclose, and report it to the functionaries and stewards to suppress it. Clarifying what the button does will reduce this problem.

Beyond that, the goal is to make all the wikis and languages more consistent, and some wikis made this change many years ago. The Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports this change. Making the edit interface easier to understand will make it easier to handle licensing and privacy questions that may arise.

Any help pages or other basic documentation about how to edit pages will also need to be updated, on-wiki and elsewhere. On wiki pages, you can use the wikitext codes  and   to display the new labels in the user's preferred language. For the language settings in your account preferences, these wikitext codes produce “ ” and “  ”.

Please share this news with community members who teach new editors and with others who may be interested. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:03, 9 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Hello, Wikinews contributors.
 * User:Pi zero and I have been talking about this change, and we'd like to try something different. It might be confusing to start with a "Publish page" button, since the first edit to an article is not the end of the Wikinews publishing process as outlined in Reviewing articles.  So we are going to try this instead:  The "Save page" button will stay the same, but MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning will have a statement added to warn inexperienced people that their contributions will immediately be shared with the general public.
 * We are assuming that every Wikinews is using a similar structure for reviewing, and therefore we are going to try this at all Wikinewses. To do this, I need the  statement translated for the copyright warning file right away!  If you speak a Wikinews language (other than English), please check m:User:Whatamidoing (WMF)/Wikinews.  It's just two sentences and should (I hope) be easy for anyone who is bilingual or multilingual.  I need these translations this week, if at all possible.
 * If you have any questions or need to reach me, then please ping me. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 24 August 2016 (UTC)