People who are new to collaborative environments like ours are sometimes surprised by third-party edits. "Wait -- somebody else can edit my post?" we hear people say. Or, more recently (and the immediate prompt for this issue), a new member disagreed with parts of an edit but thought that there was no recourse -- the person didn't realize that it's possible and permitted to edit further, even rolling back parts of an edit.
We have a general goal of adding more "just in time" guidance. There are a few scenarios where a user encounters a third-party edit:
Someone without the Edit Posts ability suggests an edit. You get a notification. If the suggestion is still pending, you can approve or reject, and we give some guidance about good edits already. This is probably fine as is.
Someone suggests an edit as above, but the edit has already been approved before you see it. You still get the notification, but when you follow the link you get the "approved suggestion" page, where your only option is to click on "return to post" (or navigate away). This would be a good place to add some info (see below).
Someone with the Edit Posts ability directly edits your post. I think (hope) you get a notification, but there's no review page to take you to, only the post itself. That edit is, however, present in the post history.
I have some ideas. There might be better ways to do this, but as a starting point for discussion:
Case 1 is covered.
For case 2, if you visit an approved suggested edit for a post you own, let's add a dismissible message explaining that you can further edit if you disagree with parts of this edit, and link to a help page (that we need to write) that explains edit philosophy. By dismissible, I mean like that notice you get on (e.g.) Meta if you visit in an incognito window -- that popup that explains what the site is about, and that you'll see until you hit the 'x'. Or we could edit the text you already see -- "You can't approve or reject suggested edits..." -- to add something like "but you can make additional edits".
Also for case 2, for all users not just the author, can we indicate on the approved-edit page if there are later edits? If someone made a large edit to your post and then somebody else edited further, you'd want to know about the latter when looking at the former. Where it says "this suggested edit was approved and applied...", we could add something like "edit 5 of 7" or "this is not the current version".
For case 3, we can't use the edit review page because it doesn't exist. But we could add the same dismissible notice to the history page, only for your post where there are edits by someone other than you. Is that hard to calculate from the history page?
People who are new to collaborative environments like ours are sometimes surprised by third-party edits. "Wait -- somebody else can edit my post?" we hear people say. Or, more recently (and the immediate prompt for this issue), a new member disagreed with parts of an edit but thought that there was no recourse -- the person didn't realize that it's possible and permitted to edit further, even rolling back parts of an edit.
We have a general goal of adding more "just in time" guidance. There are a few scenarios where a user encounters a third-party edit:
I have some ideas. There might be better ways to do this, but as a starting point for discussion:
Case 1 is covered.
For case 2, if you visit an approved suggested edit for a post you own, let's add a dismissible message explaining that you can further edit if you disagree with parts of this edit, and link to a help page (that we need to write) that explains edit philosophy. By dismissible, I mean like that notice you get on (e.g.) Meta if you visit in an incognito window -- that popup that explains what the site is about, and that you'll see until you hit the 'x'. Or we could edit the text you already see -- "You can't approve or reject suggested edits..." -- to add something like "but you can make additional edits".
Also for case 2, for all users not just the author, can we indicate on the approved-edit page if there are later edits? If someone made a large edit to your post and then somebody else edited further, you'd want to know about the latter when looking at the former. Where it says "this suggested edit was approved and applied...", we could add something like "edit 5 of 7" or "this is not the current version".
For case 3, we can't use the edit review page because it doesn't exist. But we could add the same dismissible notice to the history page, only for your post where there are edits by someone other than you. Is that hard to calculate from the history page?