Help:Notifications/Thanks/Arguments

This page lists arguments for and against design features gleaned from other pages.

Specify which edit was thanked in Special:Log/thanks
Arguments collected from T51087. This list is not complete, as the compiler was running out of time. Please feel free to add arguments from Jun 5 2013, 3:45 PM on. (A problem with this discussion is that it got chattier as it went on, and arguments became repetitive or drilling into ramifications of the discussion, and less explicitly pro/con, which means they may need to be reworded to fit in this pro/con list.)

Pro

 * 1) both for private and public records' sake (part of title of proposal T51087 by MZMcBride)
 * 2) it would be more useful to have the edit in the log because once it scrolls off your notification flyout/page, how else are you going to remember what it was? (MZMcBride, Jun 3 2013, 5:27 PM)
 * 3) having it public in the log (which I'm sure few will find) will make it easy to validate claims of people sarcastically thanking people in an attempt to harass them. (MZMcBride, Jun 3 2013, 5:27 PM, similar argument made by Technical13 on Jun 5 2013, 3:42 PM)
 * 4) The contents of an on-wiki communication should never be kept confidential. Keeping "the substance of the thanks private" is inappropriate. (Kww, Jun 5 2013, 2:30 AM)
 * 5) The lack of basic accountability measures in the extension generates distrust in the tool as a whole. [(This claim was subsequently disputed, and not backed up)] Bug 51087 comment 3 shows that communities want users to be held accountable for their thanking. (Nemo_bis, Oct 4 2013, 6:14 PM)
 * 6)  the log is almost completely meaningless and frustrating as of now, because each entry gives absolutely 0 context. Logs like patrol, pagetranslation, translationnotifications do this without problems [...] (Nemo_bis, Oct 4 2013, 6:14 PM)
 * 7) So that people can know what they are being thanked for. Just receiving unspecified thanks has little meaning. If you know what it is for, you will know why you are appreciated, and will try to make good edits like that in the future. That will stimulate good editing on Wikipedia. Debresser (talk) 06:35, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Con

 * 1) That allows the substance of the thanks to remain private while still providing a public record of the action in the event of someone using it for spamming. (Kaldari, Jun 3 2013, 5:06 PM)
 * 2) Thanks are intended to be ephemeral. I wouldn't expect someone to go trawling through the logs to find old thanks for themselves. That's not the intended use of the logging. (Kaldari, Jun 3 2013, 6:01 PM)
 * 3) I can also imagine cases where not including the edit may actually reduce conflict. For example, if you want to thank an editor for reverting a persistent vandal or POV-pusher, or you want to thank an admin who warned an editor who was harassing you. (Kaldari, Jun 3 2013, 6:01 PM)
 * 4) what we're trying to avoid is a situation where the thanks button can in some way undermine consensus, or be used as a vector for it - we don't need [...] a situation where an editor justifies themselves based on thirty people hitting 'thank' on their edit. [...] (Ironholds, Jun 5 2013, 3:33 PM)
 * 5)  One of the other considerations that weighed heavily in the design of the Thanks feature was to avoid feature bloat [(The claim that the request would be "feature bloat" was subsequently disputed, and not backed up)] that doomed ArticleFeedback. [...] Thanks was designed to avoid all of that by being dead simple and ephemeral. [k]eeping a detailed permanent record of every action that transpires on Wikipedia [...] has real costs in additional workload for the community, especially folks like admins and oversighters who have to deal with complaints. The way we tried to strike a balance was giving people a way to complain about Thank volume abuse (sending too many thanks), but avoiding the drama of people complaining about who thanked who for what edit. [...] (Kaldari, May 16 2014, 11:59 PM)
 * 6) The difficulty of changing the setting, and communicating out the change, particularly for editors or wikis who like (or at least expect) that the specific edit is not publicly disclosed. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 14 October 2015 (UTC)