OK, gotcha. Here’s what I’m understanding:
- For wiki posts, signaling to the community as a whole that a post had recently been edited is helpful for two reasons:
- It helps distribute the responsibility of reviewing changes, to ensure their accuracy.
- it helps show that they are up to date
- For conversations, given that Discourse discourages multiple replies, people need a way to see that a significant edit was made instead.
I think you’re right that bumps had been a solution to both of these needs.
We will need to think about how best to address them, given the removal of the bump on edit behavior.
For the conversation one, I think the answer may be to soften the discouragement of multiple replies. I think there are cases where multiple replies makes more sense than edits, and we can adjust the wording and logic of when the nudge appears to help users make the right decision.
For the wiki one, I think it needs a bit more discussion, but I’ll share some hot takes. I think instead of discouraging replies on topics, we should encourage them, and design things diff with that in mind. If they were allowed and encouraged, I think I may shift expectations to say “if you make a significant edit, drop a reply on the topic briefly describing the changes and why you made them”. That’d bump the topic and make it even more transparent. We’ve talked about how replies should be displayed on wiki and documentation topics, so maybe that’d deserve another look.
Another thing I could imagine doing is having some shared notification stream for edits to wikis and documentation. For example, a chat channel that gets a message posted to it automatically when there are edits made. The group that actively manages it could see those there together, and discuss in a thread of needed. Not sure how hard that’d be to wire up today with existing tools. (There’s some possible overlap with this idea and this other discussion: How automated reports could help keeping Meta tidy)