We had an anon who, upon receiving the {{test}} template, proceeded to blank an article claiming they were using it as the Sandbox. That seemed a bit off to me, so I opened the Sandbox logged-out in incognito, and the Edit tab next to “Help Us” is missing. The Edit tab is appearing on other articles for me when signed out, and I’m on an IPv4 address right now, so it’s not an IPv6 problem. This occurred on both Chrome and Firefox.
I’m getting the “Processing” glitch when trying to upload images again, so I’m going to embed the image manually:
It’s possible this is because the Sandbox is one of those “meta” pages, but since the {{test}} template links to the Sandbox and anonymous editors can’t access Talk pages (and therefore can’t let us know they can’t edit the Sandbox), that means anons have no choice but to test the editing software on article pages. It doesn’t seem ideal.
7 Likes
JayneG
2
Yeah, this is a known issue
that definitely isn’t ideal, but perhaps as a stop gap, we could edit the intro of the Sandbox to say that editing the page needs an account and link to where to create an account?
2 Likes
… I guess, but I have to be frank in that there’s some dramatic irony in a test page of a wiki – which should be editable by anyone – having its edit link disabled and this apparently being so low on the priority list that it may not even be fixed.
2 Likes
JayneG
4
No doubt. On the other side, I think if we looked at the number of positive anonymous edits vs logged in edits, we could say that it would be more beneficial to the community and wikiHow as a whole if editors are logged in ;). But of course there are always edge cases and we don’t want to exclude those who want to stay anonymous and do good around wikihow. I’m just trying to think of how we can help in the moment.
Tbh I’d rather direct genuine vandals to the Sandbox as well. A community member is more likely to check the Sandbox at a given time than a random FA, so if someone vandalized the Sandbox and a new patroller accidentally patrolled the vandalism, that’d affect logged-out readers less than if the same problem happened on a FA.
3 Likes
