Recent Changes / Edit Review system
On traditional wikis the recent changes page is a hub for contributors, often the first visit of the day for an editor checking what's new, or a potential editor checking the pulse/health of a wiki they may get involved in. Alongside it are the patrol systems, essentially checking over various changes which may require attention, and attempting to filter out vandalism.
For arbital to be vandal-resistant, we will need something which fulfils the same functions, most importantly making sure damaging edits don't slip under the radar. Additionally I suspect their systems could be dramatically improved upon. The main changes which come to mind right now are:
- Making it easy/natural to give feedback and suggestions to editors, rather than just accepting or rejecting their changes. Social reinforcement is super-important for building a healthy and productive community. Users on WP created barnstars for this, and later it was deemed important enough that thanks were added on, but in the patrol process as an easy to do action seems much more useful place for it if we're designing it from scratch rather than hacking things onto a massive site.
- Making it easy to filter recent changes by domain and maybe other more fine-grained things.
- Having the review group feel like a team with internal social reinforcement (official private slack channels?) and achievements for doing lots of high quality patrolling. Making it an opt-in usergroup (possibly with a karma requirement) where you're assigned a mentor to help you learn how to handle tricky cases may be a good way of doing this.
- (less certain) Having reviewed/not reviewed be less binary, instead allow multiple people to perform the patrol action on an edit. By default display only unreviewed edits, but allow users to search for, say, edits which changed more than 10 lines which only have one review.