Yes, I agree, the abuse of the term "publish" by tools to mean "move out of sandbox to make a live article" is extremely misleading and you should fix that and explain to your users that "sandboxes" and "drafts" are all published content that have all the related social and legal concerns that such a term implies. If you have copy from half a decade ago still using the term "save" you should definitely fix that.

In T297520#7567353, @Jdforrester-WMF wrote:

Yes, I agree, the abuse of the term "publish" by tools to mean "move out of sandbox to make a live article" is extremely misleading and you should fix that and explain to your users that "sandboxes" and "drafts" are all published content that have all the related social and legal concerns that such a term implies. If you have copy from half a decade ago still using the term "save" you should definitely fix that.

The problem isn't so much with tools or instructions in our ecosystem that still use "Save", it's the broader context that users bring to Wikipedia: they are already used to concepts of "Draft", "Save", and "Publish" that don't match up exactly with how Wikipedia uses those terms, so they get bitten by this mismatch between what they assume a button will do versus what it does. (Yes, Wiki Education fixed the places that say "Save" so that they now say "Publish" half a decade ago, and also added new instructions to explicitly explain that the "Publish" button is the one to use to persist your changes. But no amount of instructions are enough to overcome something a user thinks they already know.)

What do you mean by "don't match up exactly with how Wikipedia uses those terms"? Can you give an example of "Publish" being used on Wikipedia in a way that means something other than "made available to the public"?

In T297520#7635422, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

What do you mean by "don't match up exactly with how Wikipedia uses those terms"? Can you give an example of "Publish" being used on Wikipedia in a way that means something other than "made available to the public"?

I'm saying that users have a concept of "Publish" already, along the lines of "release into the world as finished and ready for the public", which they assume would correspond to turning a sandbox into a normal "live" article. I'm not saying that Wikipedia uses the term to mean something other than "make available to the public", but that definition is subtly — but significantly — different from what many new users think "Publish" means in the context of a sandbox.

I don't know what your current training program looks like, so perhaps this is a useless question. You said that the documentation already explains this, and I agree with you about the value of documentation. Does your program present any information about the principle of working in public? Or explain that if they want to save something privately, they can save the wikitext code off wiki, and paste it back in later (just watch for straight quotes being "helpfully" turned into curly quotes by word processing software)?

Since this change was implemented, I have seen a few comments from new editors about this in the context of userspace sandboxes. I find that it communicates the point very clearly: if you click this button, anybody in the world will be able to see what you wrote. That people hesitate to click that button might be proof that it's working as designed.

In T297520#7636714, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

I don't know what your current training program looks like, so perhaps this is a useless question. You said that the documentation already explains this, and I agree with you about the value of documentation. Does your program present any information about the principle of working in public? Or explain that if they want to save something privately, they can save the wikitext code off wiki, and paste it back in later (just watch for straight quotes being "helpfully" turned into curly quotes by word processing software)?

Since this change was implemented, I have seen a few comments from new editors about this in the context of userspace sandboxes. I find that it communicates the point very clearly: if you click this button, anybody in the world will be able to see what you wrote. That people hesitate to click that button might be proof that it's working as designed.

In the cases where my team has seen it come up, the story typically goes something like "I searched all around for a save button, but I didn't find one and knew my draft wasn't ready for mainspace, so I didn't want to "Publish", so I assumed/hoped it was automatically saved, and then I lost hours of work." The most recent case along these lines that I recall was a graduate student, which is perhaps why an alternative definition of "publish" was so salient for them.

Our trainings do cover the fact that sandboxes can be viewed by anyone, but something being covered in training material or documentation is never a guarantee that any particular user will read or comprehend it. I don't think this is a confusion that is particular to Wiki Education student editors — which is why I'm being a squeaky wheel about it. I think it merits user research. We're just in a position to hear back about it, and it's something that instructors have repeatedly shared with as as a common point of confusion among their students.

This week I'm training teachers and they main doubt is exactly this: how to save without *publishing* it. I explain them that this is published because it can be seen *in public* but if you google it you won't find their article, but it's not clear for them either how a Sandbox can be published before it is "ready for publishing".

In T297520#7636874, @Ragesoss wrote:

In the cases where my team has seen it come up, the story typically goes something like "I searched all around for a save button, but I didn't find one and knew my draft wasn't ready for mainspace, so I didn't want to "Publish", so I assumed/hoped it was automatically saved, and then I lost hours of work." The most recent case along these lines that I recall was a graduate student, which is perhaps why an alternative definition of "publish" was so salient for them.

Yeah, that's really unfortunate. Of course, VisualEditor does save drafts automatically, but only locally onto the user's browser local storage if that's not disabled, so if they go to another computer, it's disabled, or it's reset by something, they'll not have the local draft with which to be re-prompted. They will also have received the "are you sure you want to close this tab, you'll lose all your work?" warning when not pressing Publish.

Here is a user story from today (I'm translating from Polish):

Hello! I have to write a Wiki article for work and unfortunately my yesterday's draft was not written anywhere. This is my first time doing this and I have a (probably trivial) question:
➡️ How do I save an article in a sandbox? Where do I do that, because I can't locate it. I only see the options: Publish / Show Preview / Preview Changes. I am asking for guidance.

And below that a clear image showing she know where the buttons are, but is convinced "Publish" is a wrong button.
Note that this is just an example from today. On our Village Pump a mentor mentioned that this is a common UX pattern.

So it seems like this problem that transcends languages or at least is also a problem in Polish. Definitely is a problem for some beginners. They just expect a "Save" button and cannot find it.

In T297520#7730214, @Nux wrote:

They just expect a "Save" button and cannot find it.

Perhaps more relevantly: They expect a "Save" button will not publish their changes on the web, and this is not permitted on WMF wikis.

Maybe this could be addressed in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:VisualEditor/User_guide#Publishing_changes ? Maybe we need to add a small "Save" button, and when you click on it, it pops up a box that says "Saving private drafts is not permitted on this wiki. Use the 'Publish' button to post your changes to {{PAGENAME}}". (My thought is that if you see "post your changes to User:Example/sandbox", you might be reassured that it will be posted to your sandbox and not to the mainspace.)

I was just in an office hour meeting with several instructors, and this came up spontaneously again; student editors find it consistently confusing that the button in their sandbox says "Publish" because they assume that to mean "Publish to mainspace". Calling the button simply "Save" is perhaps not the right solution, but anything other than "Publish" would likely be a big improvement in the sandbox context.

If the only issue renaming “Publish” button for drafts to “Save” is the possible misunderstanding about public status of pages, we could simply add a warning: “Please note your changes will be publicly visible”, with a checkbox “Do not show this warning next time”.