Who is verifying changes?

Hi guys,

I am new here, so I found a small typo in a particular MDN page and decided to fix it. However, I did not see pending review or anything, so I was wondering how things work under the hood?

Here is the article in question, if you click on my name at the bottom you can see the change.

P.S. I am raising this here because I could not find the answer on google, plus I think that MDN documentation quality is of paramount importance. If there are no clear mechanisms then peer review for each change no matter how small could be a possible solution.

Hi @vitaliyterziev ! Welcome and thanks for contributing!

MDN Web Docs is a wiki, so your changes go live immediately. Any reviews happen after the fact. Currently, members of the staff content team “watch” sections of the wiki, to keep an eye out for “bad” changes, which can include vandalism, spam, misplaced translations, or simply incorrect info. (We also have automated means of detecting spam, which I will not describe in a public forum.) Staff members revert bad changes (as can any logged-in user) and can ban malicious users.

In the long term, we are looking at moving to a “pull request” model for content changes, with review-in-advance, as you suggest. However, we will need to evolve our processes to enable non-staff reviewers. If staff were a bottleneck for every change, given the current volume of changes, they would get nothing else done, and also they would all go bonkers.

Some pieces of MDN content already live on GitHub, most significantly interactive examples and the browser compatibility data that is displayed in reference pages. The governance structure of the latter project would likely be a model for other content in the future.

Does that address your concern?

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Hi @jswisher,

Thank you for getting back to me and for taking the time to share details of your plans moving forward, your answer is much appreciated.