Article edit review revue?

Procedural question: what to do when an edit is ‘questionable’. Is there a valid avenue for discussion besides filing a doc bug?

At article <input type=“checkbox”> back in July someone updated an example to a clever alternate way to do something, using CSS rather than JS. Irritatingly, they forgot to update the old text above “This is achieved with a simple block of JavaScript.”

But (and since I’m more a JS coder than CSS) I thought “well, which example is more informative, the 11 lines of painful explicit JS or the 8 lines of confusing CSS magic?”

So, what is the best forum for discussing either/or decisions, where best judgement may be a collaborative affair? At Wikipedia I might change and drop a comment on the article’s talk page, explaining the conundrum. But where here? Talk pages don’t really seem to function here?

Hi there,

Discourse (or filing a doc bug) is probably the best way. We’ve not had talk pages at least in the time I’ve worked for Mozilla, for various reasons.

For the addition you pointed out — thanks, I missed this one! I’ve not subscribed to the input type pages so I can watch all changes made to them.

In this case I reverted the code change because I think the CSS is more cryptic and confusing, plus it has a couple of disadvantages compared to the JS — it affects page layout, plus it doesn’t clear the other field content after it has been re-hidden.

In the early days of MDN, it was on MediaWiki, and had Talk pages, but this community never developed the culture of using Talk pages that Wikipedia has. So when we implemented our own wiki platform (pull requests welcome), we didn’t include Talk pages as a feature. There are a few Talk pages hanging around from the MediaWiki era, but they’re seldom found or touched.

Much as I would love to have an on-site discussion feature on MDN, currently, discussing here or in Bugzilla are your best options.

I think pretty much all of us would like to have some form of discussion, annotation, and/or edit-review system on MDN. It’s just a matter of prioritization and time, the twin devils of the world of software development. :slight_smile:

Eric Shepherd
Senior Technical Writer

MDN Web Docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/

Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/sheppy

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