Special annotations - for links to articles based on responses, summaries of correspondence, or admin notes

[RichardTaylor]

Administrators could have an additional check-box when they make an annotation; to check if the annotation is being made in an official capacity as an administrator of the site.

This could
i/ Highlight the annotation eg. via a different background colour
ii/ Cause an alert box to appear at the top of the request thread, and on HTML conversions, and if possible on downloaded documents, suggesting the reader looks at the annotations.

Administrator annotations can be important eg. drawing attention to known inaccuracies in material released, noting where and why redaction by administrators has occurred, or explaining inconsistencies in the timeline - if admin intervention has occurred.

[RichardTaylor]

It might be desirable to differentiate between a normal admin annotation; and one we want to draw lots of attention to and stick at the top of a request thread or is that getting too complex with too many options?

[RichardTaylor]

As well as a background colour - the WDTK logo could be shown on the top right of admin annotations?

[RichardTaylor]

It would aid transparency of reasons for takedowns if an explanation could be given to visitors to request threads which have been taken down.

One possible option might be to make high prominence administrator annotations visible on such hidden request thread pages?

[RichardTaylor]

A user today has asked us to put an annotation at the top of a request; to help those reading the request; it would have been useful to have had this feature.

The annotation in question is
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/reports_concerning_hs_at_leisure#comment-27953

[TomSteinberg]

Will be looked at in #1523

[RichardTaylor]

Related to this could be other types of special annotations eg.

• Annotations linking to articles based on the response
• Annotations linking to places material released has been reused

[RichardTaylor]

Classifying special types of annotations eg. links to articles or other outcomes from requests could be useful for research on the impact of Alaveteli sites.

[RichardTaylor]

Another common type of annotation is a link from one request to another.

We might want to handle those in a special way too.

[RichardTaylor]

Not specially flagging links from requests to articles etc. based on them means we're missing out on possible information on the impact of sites, and missing the opportunity to point readers to requests of interest eg. via a page showing requests which have recently been cited, or highlighting requests with recent citations on user/body pages.

[RichardTaylor]

The content of any prominent admin banner on a request should populate <meta property="og:description”> so that the admin banner content is presented in auto-generated snippets on search engines and elsewhere.

[itsaphel]

I'm a bit lost reading through the comments in the request, but I tried to have a play around with the idea in the original issue comment. Do you mean something like the pic attached? (when enabled for a given annotation the background colour is changed, and username replaced with either "Administrator" or the installation name)

At the top of the request it adds something like:

Feel free to say if I missed the point though 😅

[garethrees]

I tried to have a play around with the idea in the original issue… Do you mean something like the pic attached?

I think this is a really great simple version (and I mean that in a very positive way!) of what is a bit of a wide-ranging issue. I'd make a couple of very minor tweaks, but I think you've hit the nail square on the head here.

I've been mulling the more generic case over for a while now and feel like I'm converging on an approach for how we'd implement it. I'll need some time to write these up in a coherent way. I'll try to work on this next Friday (2021-08-06), but we're quite busy at the moment. Hassle me if I haven't come back to this by the end of August 2021.

Once I've done that, we can figure out whether this specific use would be easy to implement in the general way, or if not, then I think we'd just want to put a little thought in to how we'd make the addition without a more generic framework so that we don't make a future migration difficult.

[RichardTaylor]

We may wish to add a prominent admin annotation to all, or a large set of, a user's requests, to make this easy features to allow admins to add such annotations in bulk may be useful. See also:

*Offer options to admin the site via bulk actions #5434

[RichardTaylor]

Consider also the ability to add a prominent admin annotation to a request based on the presence of a word or phrase in the correspondence, this kind of feature could link to:

*Publicly identify certain uses of the service as less than ideal #6254

[RichardTaylor]

Consider how a standard annotation/notice could perhaps be triggered by a request specific tag, or set of tags, in a case where the notice might be something like:

"WhatDoTheyKnow has received a request to remove material from this correspondence thread. As of the time of writing we have not removed any material".

One would want a tag, or tags, which only admins could add - which complicates #2302

Tags might be eg. takedown takedown_rejected

Such tagging could inform a transparency report (#2658).

[RichardTaylor]

Another common type of annotation is a link from one request to another.
We might want to handle those in a special way too.

More specifically we might want to specially handle links between requests for the same information at different times.

[RichardTaylor]

There may be standard annotations, or annotation snippets, which admins want to use on many threads.

eg.

• Specific example: " Enable admins to note when a "Notice of European data protection removal" has been received in relation to a request Enable admins to note when a "Notice of European data protection removal" has been received in relation to a request #4622
• A note saying that we recognise a request is poor quality / less than ideal but explaining why such correspondence gets published anyway.

[RichardTaylor]

Consider also the ability to add a prominent admin annotation to a request based on the presence of a word or phrase in the correspondence

There's quite a risk of false positives - showing notes on inappropriate requests if we go for keywords rather than the more specific tags.

There are pros and cons though - keyword based notes would be shown on large numbers of requests without needing manual/admin effort to tags those requests.

If we had a gambling warning would we show it on all requests to bodies which distribute lottery funding? If we had an alcohol warning would we want it to appear on requests about cleaning products? It's probably one to experiment with, and try keyword triggered notes first, and if we need a more nuanced system eg. keyword1 NOT keyword2 or keyword AND specific_body we could suggest those enhancements later if needed.

[RichardTaylor]

One of the proposed types of special annotation here is a summary of the correspondence.

We could go further, and have a one-sentence, or tweet sized summary.

One could imagine an interesting page compiled from such one sentence summaries, as well as them being helpful things to present at the top of a correspondence thread.

Example from one I was just looking at:

• "The RNLI does not invoice HM Coastguard for any operations." (details)

Only a fraction of threads would suit summarising in such a way, but it could be done for many.

[RichardTaylor]

The new "generalised notes" feature appears to be a big step towards the features described in this ticket.

[HelenWDTK]

This issue has been automatically closed due to a lack of discussion or resolution for over 12 months.
Should we decide to revisit this issue in the future, it can be reopened.