Last modified: 2013-12-13 13:34:35 UTC
I think a good enhancement to the page history view would be to give users the option to change their own edit summaries. This would be useful in cases where editors forget to provide a summary or wish to fix errors or otherwise improve their summaries. To avoid conflicts, only the person who made the edit should be able to change the summary--and it may be a good idea to require that the editor be logged in. So that other users could see the changes to the edit summary if they want, I'd design the "edit summary edit" feature to generate an indicator next to the summary if it has been changed. The indicator could simply be a number that shows how many versions of the summary exist. If possible, the number might link to an edit summary edit history. I have no knowledge of how difficult this would be to implement, but I think it would be worth the effort if it can be achieved without too much trouble. As mentioned in bug (enhancement request) no. 1279, some editors achieve this by doing a dummy edit, but this only works if there's been no intervening edit. That same enhancement request mentions an alternative that I have expanded upon here. Thanks in advance for either considering this enhancement or telling me why it wouldn't work. --Eric
User can see the preview of the summary at the moment when previewing the page so he has enough chances to tweak the summary as much as he likes. Also editing of summaries could cause misunderstandings if their meaning was changed, therefore I don't think this is a good idea. On the other hand, sysops or bcts could have such right to overwrite the summary eg. to remove bad words, personal attacks or personal data, but still I'm not sure if changing of history is the right way.
(In reply to comment #1) > > On the other hand, sysops or bcts could have such right to overwrite the > summary eg. to remove bad words, personal attacks or personal data, but still > I'm not sure if changing of history is the right way. > It will be possible to hide it when the new Specialpage [[Special:RevisionDelete]] will work.
Hi all- New here and not sure what I'm doing, but I re-opened this bug from a status of "resolved, WONTFIX" because--taking the wild guess that "WONTFIX" means my suggestion won't be considered--I'd like to know why. I hope I'm not out of line re-opening it. I wrote an e-mail to the person who I think assigned it the "WONTFIX" resolution, but haven't heard back (brion@wikimedia.org, August 8). I'd like to know whether my idea is feasible or not. I think my original submission addresses the concern Danny expresses in Comment 1. Thanks. --Eric
We have no intention of allowing records of past actions to be altered by end users.
Hi Brion- Thanks for responding. Maybe I didn't write it clearly, but I think the second part of the second paragraph of my original post covers the record issue. Still, as I say above, I don't know if an edit summary history could be implemented easily. --Eric
Ummm.... It doesn't matter. :-) Brion has the final say on everything to do with MediaWiki. The developers won't be working on this bug any time in the near future.
I wasn't polling users to see if they thought my comment mattered, and I'm not interested in who has "final say" in anything. Just curious to know if the idea could be implemented, and, if not, why not. --Eric
