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"Irrelevent" flag for history
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Description

Author: j.anvier

Description:
Hello everybody,

Here is a little idea. History actually lists all vandalisms and tests that some
users/IPs made, at the same level as all the useful contributions (the one that
are really needed by GFDL). Although it is certainly useful for sociologists
studying Wikipedia, it is not for usual readers and it gives a bad feeling to
some people that come from time to time to request us, admin, to delete those
edits from article history.

But it is impossible to accept their request. We can't delete 10s of times an
article due to vandalism or kids testing, that would make maintenance impossible.

It would be cool to be able to set an "irrelevent" flag attached to an edit that
prevents it to be displayed among the others in the history, except for admins
who certainly need this kind of information.

For example, a revert could set auomatically this flag for the whole set of
reverted edits (and on the revert itself, probably). And for past edits, a
little link on the side of edits in history panel or under edits title when
viewing revision (like the one for patrolled edit) should do the job.

At the contrary, these irrelevent edits should still be listed in the editor's
list of edits, so that people can see whether the editor's usual work is correct
or not (for an adminship request, for example).

Crediting vandals is just weird and it makes history less usable (some users
even use javascript coloring on it, now).
What do you think about it?

Regards,
Eden2004


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz7631

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 9:23 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz7631.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

j.anvier wrote:

Oh, by the way, I know some people not administrators would want to see those
vandalisms. Maybe a preference settings would be useful...

Eden2004

j.anvier wrote:

Ok, sorry, that just remind me we had a desision made half a year ago about
this, asking to not modify the history for these kind of stuffs by a wide
majority
(http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Prise_de_d%C3%A9cision/Int%C3%A9grit%C3%A9_des_historiques,
but maybe with a good description of what could be hidden, the result would have
been diffirent).

So this preference setting is really a requirement, in case you consider this
feature useful.

Eden2004

j.anvier wrote:

Ok, here is a short summary of our discussion:

  • "Irrelevent" flag can be set per edit.
  • User can choose with User preference between complete history or clean history.
  • On the history page, a link allows to see the list visible in the other mode

(so complete for the one who chose clean, clean for the one who chose complete).

  • "Irrelevent edit" still accessible through permalink and still listed in user

contribution list.

  • Admin's reverts automaticaly set "irrelevent" on reverted edits. Can also be

set on history page by admin and if possible, on diff.

Useful and flexible enough to permit different uses.
What do you thing of this proposal ?

Eden2004

ayg wrote:

I think bug 3640 would solve this, yes? The flag could be auto-set on rollback
for the rollback and all rolled-back edits, and on manual reverts as well if the
saved version exactly matches the version edited. Such edits definitely
shouldn't be completely hidden by default, though, even from page history. They
should just be collapsed, perhaps, or grayed out and italicized, or whatever.

j.anvier wrote:

Hi Simetrical,
Yes, I think it's the same idea. I was thinking at the fact that a real clean
history would be especially great for a DVD version (as we have to provide
history -or link to history- with articles).

But yes, maybe grayed or stricked out is enough. I let you make the wisest choice.

(Pretty incredible that we had a similar idea with just two weeks interval o_O)

Eden2004

ayg wrote:

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 3640 ***