I realized that, 90% of the time, whenever I edit another person's post, my editing summary looks like this:
Improved formatting, spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, indentation, removed the bloody xcode tag.
I'm pretty sure that I've written the same thing a million times, I was thinking that maybe we could introduce a check-boxed editing questionnaire at the end, instead of the editing summary.
Mockup
(Link to the previous version)
The mockup swaps the Summary text input with a series of checkboxes, each checkbox representing a category of change, and having their own custom tooltip detailing what/which changes fall under the category.
The "Save Edits" box would need at least one check box to be marked.
The "Other" text box auto-marks the checkbox to its left, so the older editing flow is supported.
Advantages
- Convenience
- Being able to track individual changes easier, for instance, a user could be black-listed for spelling, but at least he gets the format right.
- Easier for new users to get accustomed to how the editing works, and what they are expected to do, like "Can I change the grammar? Oh, there's a box about it, then I can". And users are genuinely asked if they have changed all that they can change with this system. You get accounted for what you've changed.
Suggested Categories
- Grammar: The text has been moved around, punctuation was changed, or other changes that don't modify words but the way they are delivered.
- Spelling: Individual words were modified.
- Text format: Stylistic changes were made to improve readability. Things like bold, italics, links or code blocks were added or removed. Or removed a link and pasted the contents it held.
- Code format: Indentation, spacing or comments were modified to ensure that the code is readable.
- Tags: Gets automatically marked if there are differences between the tags, the user cannot manually check or uncheck this box, this is as a feedback that the tags were changed, in case he forgot.
- Other: None of the above cut it? Have a text box that can be clicked (checkbox gets marked when doing so) and write away.
Possible Side-Features
- Auto-check boxes depending of the nature of the change, if it's mostly whitespace, then add the
code format
tag, if there's minor changes in a lot of words, then might bespelling
. - New users could be asked to fill two or more checkboxes of changes, as part of their learning.
- "Translation". Mark a checkbox with a drop-down, and marking that the text has been translated from another language, so that users proficient in that language can verify the correctness of the translation in the review queue (or even a custom queue, like "translators queue"). This would be a big feature for SO.
- Badges for each category, here's a mockup for those.
edited tags; reformatted code; fixed grammar; dethank+desig
edit summaries. (And I just made a typo in this comment...)