Mailing List Archive

Tried my "advanced Recend Changes"?

Erik Moeller wrote:

>We could save a lot of space by summarizing directly subsequent edits
>made by one user into a single edit. User foo edits article bar 10
>times, and for each edit, the previous one is deleted. This would also
>reduce clutter in RC. Just check if OLD contains a top revision by the
>same user and delete it before inserting the new row (preferably as one
>transaction).
>
>To avoid involuntary overwriting of one's own words, we could do this
>only if the previous edit had no edit comment, and occurred less than 10
>minutes ago.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>Regards,
>
>Erik
>
>

On Mit, 2003-02-05 at 13:40, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Tried my "advanced Recend Changes"?

I use and enjoy it. But this is a different matter. Even with RC+ you
have benefits from summarizing edits in the actual table, since you do
not have to unfold edits made by a single user to see the edit text.
Then there's the history and contributions functions, which are all
cluttered by a large number of subsequent edits, and of course the OLD
table grows hideously large.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 01:31:47PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> We could save a lot of space by summarizing directly subsequent edits
> made by one user into a single edit. User foo edits article bar 10
> times, and for each edit, the previous one is deleted. This would also
> reduce clutter in RC. Just check if OLD contains a top revision by the
> same user and delete it before inserting the new row (preferably as one
> transaction).
>
> To avoid involuntary overwriting of one's own words, we could do this
> only if the previous edit had no edit comment, and occurred less than 10
> minutes ago.
>
> Thoughts?

This isn't any good.
If one breaks something by accident, it should be possible to restore it.

On Mit, 2003-02-05 at 13:57, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> This isn't any good.
> If one breaks something by accident, it should be possible to restore it.

What kind of mistake? Consider these cases:

1) User edits text, does something wrong. Saves text. Notices mistake.
Edits text again, fixes mistake.
2) User makes major edits to text. Saves text. Notices minor mistake,
edits text again, accidentally deletes two paragraphs and saves.
Previous text is *not* overwritten because it has an edit comment.
3) Other user notices major error/vandalism by user. Reverts to previous
edit by other user.

Where are the problems?

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 02:14:02PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Where are the problems?

First, user edits a page.
Then, the same user edits it again, but due to mouse slippery,
browser sending problems or something like that, broken version of
article is submitted.

Such things happen sometimes.

On Mit, 2003-02-05 at 15:52, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 02:14:02PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > Where are the problems?
>
> First, user edits a page.
> Then, the same user edits it again, but due to mouse slippery,
> browser sending problems or something like that, broken version of
> article is submitted.
>
> Such things happen sometimes.

True, and as I said, we can check if the user has entered an edit
comment (good indication for a major change) and if he has, the
subsequent edit does not replace the previous one.
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

> True, and as I said, we can check if the user has entered an
> edit comment (good indication for a major change) and if he
> has, the subsequent edit does not replace the previous one.

But what if he didn't? What if he made a major change, posted it, and
then went back to proofread, and was depending on your feature to allow
him to just add comment at the end of the process?

On Wednesday 05 February 2003 05:34 am, wikitech-l-request@wikipedia.org
wrote:
> We could save a lot of space by summarizing directly subsequent edits
> made by one user into a single edit. User foo edits article bar 10
> times, and for each edit, the previous one is deleted. This would also
> reduce clutter in RC. Just check if OLD contains a top revision by the
> same user and delete it before inserting the new row (preferably as one
> transaction).
>
> To avoid involuntary overwriting of one's own words, we could do this
> only if the previous edit had no edit comment, and occurred less than 10
> minutes ago.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Although I love the idea I do fear that information may be lost. For example I
will often completely rewrite an article on a temp page, check it, then paste
that text into the main article stating that the article had been completely
rewritten. Then when I reread it a second time I often find an embarrassing
typo within 5 minutes. I then edit the article and say in the edit summary
"typo". It would be very bad if "typo" showed-up as the only comment on the
combined edit.

IMO it would also be good to set the combine edit timeout at an hour or maybe
even all subsequent edits made in the same UTC day (my personal favorite). So
how about this:

Combine all the comments in the order in which they were made and separate
them with a semicolon. For example:

(cur) (last) . . M 21:07 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (typo)
(cur) (last) . . 20:46 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (opps - forgot some stuff)
(cur) (last) . . 20:28 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (new format ready for
general wikipedia consumption -- enjoy)

would become:

(cur) (last) . . 20:28 - 21:07 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (new format
ready for general wikipedia consumption -- enjoy ; opps - forgot some stuff ;
M typo)

Notice the range of times given. Combining comments would also mean that we
should allow more text in the combined edit summary than we would allow in a
single edit summary since the combined edit comment will often be larger than
a regular edit comment.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)