StagedCommits

“Staged Commits” means that when you save a change, it doesn’t actually change the page right away. When you hit the “Save” button, the page still looks like it did before you made any changes. You have to wait for someone to authorize your changes, before they actually apply.

Who authorizes your changes? Perhaps Authorization comes from a dedicated site maintainer, or perhaps it comes after review by your peers.

Why would you do this? There are a couple reasons.

1. Protection from vandals. Consider Seattle Wireless, for example. Seattle Wireless has been slashdotted several times, and each time, some visitor decides to erase the contents of the front page. It’s not a major problem- the contents are generally restored after the slashdotting. But it a neusance, and it looks bad for the reputation of wiki as a whole.
2. A sense of communal control. I don’t know if this would happen or not, but I think that people might write differently if they knew their peers had to approve of their changes. Of course, we don’t want to be oppressive, so a feature like DocViewThreadViewSplit might be good to implement at the same time. That way, people could make WikiKM:ThreadMode contributions freely, but the WikiKM:DocumentMode contributions would be peer reviewed.

Possibilities

Seperation of Document Mode and Thread Mode Contributions

As described in point #2 above. Confine staging to document mode contributions. Thread mode contributions are automatic. There are many other advantages that come with seperating document mode and thread view; The theme is explored further in DocViewThreadViewSplit.

Change Threads

People could have a thread-mode discussion on changes..!

That is, for each staged change, there is also a thread-mode discussion, about the change. This could potentially lead to high quality posts, because there is deliberation over every change.

Contributors Automatically See Own Pages

It could work like this: When you make a change, and hit save, you see the page as if the save was actually made. That is, everything seems to work like it does now- You hit Save, the change is made. Only other people don’t see the change.

This may be confusing, but it may also be a little more gratifying.

Perhaps while trying this out, set it as an option that can be turned on and off.

Automatic Authorization Prompt

When someone has some power over whether an authorization is accepted or not, it’s made as easy as possible.

When someone with power looks at the page, they are automatically presented with the proposed page, and given a diff with respect to the older version. They are immediately prompted to authorize the changes, reject the changes, or defer a decision until later.

Implementations

I’m not presently aware of any implementations.

Terminology

staged change - a change (or changes, in the case of AtomicCommits) that is waiting to be applied.

Problems

People might not want to post, because they want to feel the power of being taken seriously and having their changes apply immediately. It might feel suffocating, or like there is a nanny watching over you that you have to please.

See Also

• It would probably be best to apply DocViewThreadViewSplit at the same time.

CategoryFeature CategoryEditing