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Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Watchlists/More specificity on the last edit indicated

< Community Wishlist Survey 2022‎ | Watchlists

More specificity on the last edit indicated

  • Problem: Currently watchlists show only the very last edit made on an article. Without going to look at the history, there is no way of knowing whether this was an isolated edit or the last in a series of edits by the same user (i.e., major changes or expansion), or the latest salvo in an edit war you had no idea was happening.
  • Proposed solution: Change "Expand watchlist to show all changes" to include an optional indicator that this was the last edit of X by User:ABC and allow a dropdown click to review all the edits made in that sequence (i.e., byte counts and edit summaries). It could also be highlighted, by user preference, if the edit is part of a sequence of reverts of an edit that is the same or substantially the same, i.e. as a possible edit war. And there are other possibilities.
  • Who would benefit: Users who work to keep articles stable and at a certain level of quality. And by extension the whole community
  • More comments: I think this would be of overall benefit to the community by making it easier to respond more quickly to vandalism and disruptive editing, and perhaps minimize the drama that breaks out when one user has just made major changes to the article that another had some time before spent a great deal of time developing.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Daniel Case (talk) 05:57, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Just enable "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in the preferences. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 09:46, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oooh, thanks for that tip, I've been wondering about that for a long time! ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Only problem is that that function displays the edits in a random order unless you expand each line, so you can't see if, for example, the vanalism-reverting bot had the last word or not. -- Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 23:26, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Having just tried it, I would refine my suggestion to be that it be made smarter: i.e., tell you if a series of edits since the last one have added/removed a lot, tell you if there's an ongoing edit war/AV bot reversions, and keep the watchlist readable by allowing you to expand the edits for individual articles if you'd like to see what they were. Daniel Case (talk) 03:02, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Daniel Case Hello there and hope you are well :) Focusing on the problem, not solution: it sounds like on your Watchlist, you want to be able to easily see how many changes there were to a page, by how many users, and if the end result was the same (meaning some sort of edit war or back-and-forth). Is that correct? This would be with the "Expand watchlist to show all changes" preference on. We have a little more room to work with there. I could envision say, an icon (defined in the legend at the top-right) next to the number of changes, indicating no content changes were made in that group of edits (and thus, there was an edit war). Something like that? MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 04:57, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@MusikAnimal (WMF): Yes, something like that, with maybe an indicator of whether there were any reverts in the series, or whether any large amount of bytes was involved. Daniel Case (talk) 05:00, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good! I think we're on the same page now :) Feel free to update the proposal to focus on adding these features to the "Expand watchlist to show all changes" feature. I'll be back in a few days and can help clean it up more if needed. Thanks and warm regards, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 05:04, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  Done Daniel Case (talk) 20:26, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I understand this problem, and support doing work on it, but I think a much more straightforward system would be to group watchlist results by page edited. The latest edit to the page would be fairly self-evident without special marking. It's not possible to tell what the owner of the watchlist is looking for so grouping/marking by editor, size of edit, etc may not be useful to a particular editor and may actually be counterproductive. I would like the group containing the oldest edit to be listed last so that the oldest edit did not continually get bumped to the top of the list by new edits. SpinningSpark 09:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • It seems that the proposed way of displaying changes is the one currently used at Special:GlobalWatchlist. ~~~~
    User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)     22:37, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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