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Add a help link to Thanks confirmation & remove the confusing word "publicly"
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Description

Currently, clicking "thank" on a diff or history page shows something like this:

Change this to

with "Help" by default linking to mw:Special:MyLanguage/Help:Notifications/Thanks (and modifiable much like these).

Rationale

This request was prompted by this discussion at enwp, in which the OP said:

It wasn't clear to me whether my thanks had been sent already and if it was asking me if I wanted to publicly thank the editor on top of that, or if publicly thanking was the only way to go.

Which is precisely the same concern/confusion that the OP of T159302, which resulted in changing the confirmation message from "Send public thanks?" to "Publicly send thanks?", had:

The message "Send public thanks for this edit?" is confusing. People have been known to misinterpret it it as giving the user a choice of "Send public thanks" vs. "Send private thanks". Actually the choice is "Send public thanks" vs. "Don't send thanks".

So the rephrasing has hardly helped.

The word "public(ly)" has been nothing but a source of confusion. I understand it was added out of concern for the feature being construed as something private (T90486), but it's steered people too far in the other direction. Pdebee said in the aforementioned thread:

A few years ago, a new joiner wanted to thank me for my initial help with her first steps as an editor, but changed her mind because she thought that “publicly” meant that tens of millions of other registered editors were going to see what she’d hoped would be a simple, private signal of personal appreciation.

...when in fact only who thanked whom when, not even for which edit or on which page, is visible—and only on Special:Log, not on any diff or history page or anyone's watchlist.

The addition of a help button and the removal of the word will hopefully put an end to this long-lasting confusion, which is why I'm submitting this as a single task.

Event Timeline

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Xaosflux renamed this task from Add a help link to Thanks confirmation & remove the confusing word "publicly" to Enable wiki links in Thanks confirmation prompts & remove the confusing word "publicly".Jul 27 2019, 6:26 PM
Xaosflux updated the task description. (Show Details)
Nardog renamed this task from Enable wiki links in Thanks confirmation prompts & remove the confusing word "publicly" to Add a help link to Thanks confirmation & remove the confusing word "publicly".EditedJul 27 2019, 6:48 PM
Nardog updated the task description. (Show Details)
Nardog added a subscriber: Xaosflux.

@Xaosflux:

there isn't likely a good "help" target to put in to the code on this one, but if it processed wikitext projects could add their own help links

What do you mean? What's wrong with linking to mw:Help:Notifications/Thanks?

@Xaosflux:

there isn't likely a good "help" target to put in to the code on this one, but if it processed wikitext projects could add their own help links

What do you mean? What's wrong with linking to mw:Help:Notifications/Thanks?

And, individual wikis can still manually override the message to have a different thanks target

That's exactly what I meant by "like these".

@Nardog there are really 2 issues here:

  1. the places this message is invoked do not parse wikitext in to links
  2. You want the message to be different

#1 is needed to support your #2 option since you want it to have links - at that point projects could customize it as needed
#2 Sure, what ever makes sense for anyone in the world that uses the thanks extension ; I don't think it should have any hard coded links to WMF projects there though

@Xaosflux The request is to add an extra help button next to the already existing "Thank" and "Cancel", not within the existing message like I proposed on enwp. "Send thanks (help)?" was originally suggested as a compromise of the option I'm requesting now after it was pointed out that adding an extra button would involve a change in the software. But now that we know the compromise would also require a change in MediaWiki anyway, why not go for the original (and better, if you ask me) option?

Aren't the "Help" links at the right top of watchlist, contributions, history, preferences, search, WhatLinksHere, recent changes, page information, etc. hard-coded? Wikimedia projects certainly don't seem to locally define all of them. So let's just follow however they are handled.

[snip]
Aren't the "Help" links at the right top of watchlist, contributions, history, preferences, search, WhatLinksHere, recent changes, page information, etc. hard-coded? Wikimedia projects certainly don't seem to locally define all of them. So let's just follow however they are handled.

If you want to see how they are set, check out the tasks associated with T226350: Special pages help links [Tracking]. The default is hard-coded, but sites can override those too

JTannerWMF moved this task from Needs Discussion to Triaged but Future on the Growth-Team board.
JTannerWMF subscribed.

This idea makes sense to the Growth-Team, however we do not have any research saying this will be a positive improvement. Volunteers are welcome to work on this but we will not be able to support any work on this due to the other work we are prioritizing at this time.

The "Publicly send thanks?" prompt is created using the jQuery.confirmable plugin which only supports two buttons. It doesn't look as if adding a third generalizes well for the plugin.

Also, saying "publicly" is even more confusing on private wikis.