Editing/Publish

The Editing team is planning to change the name of the "Save page" button to "Publish page". This change will probably happen in late July, and it will be consistent in all editing environments. The change will be announced in m:Tech/News when it happens. If you are fluent in a language other than English, please check the status of translations at translatewiki.net

The main reason for this change is to avoid confusion for new editors. Repeated user research studies with new editors have shown that some believed that "Save page" would save a private copy of a new page in their accounts, rather than permanently publishing their changes on the Web. It is important for this part of the user interface to be clear, since it is difficult to remove public information once it is published. We believe that the confusion caused by the "Save page" button increases the workload for experienced editors, who have to clean up the information that people unintentionally disclose, and report it to the functionaries and stewards to suppress it. Clarifying what the button does will reduce this problem.

Beyond that, the goal is to make all the wikis and languages more consistent, and some wikis made this change many years ago. The Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports this change. Making the edit interface easier to understand will make it easier to handle licensing and privacy questions that may arise.

Any help pages or other basic documentation about how to edit pages will also need to be updated, on-wiki and elsewhere. You can use the wikitext code {{int:Publishpage}} to display the new label in the user's preferred language on any wiki page.