Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:04:51 UTC
When you edit a previous version of a page, so that the warning about editing an old version of the page appears, and then use the "show changes" button, the diff is generated using the newest version of the page, rather than the original source code of version of the page that is being edited. It would be helpful to have the ability to make a diff from the original text being edited.
Show Changes should show what your edit will change, therefore by definition it should be a diff against the current revision -- the current functionality is both intuitive and useful, changing it would cause confusion and clutter the interface. Closing as WONTFIX.
"Show changes" reads equally well as "show what has been changed in the edit box". In other words, show what changes have been made since the edit link was selected. I filed this bug because the current functionality didn't do what I expected it to when I was trying to figure out whether some text had been copied directly from an old revision of an article.
I provisionally agree with MinuteElectron that the correct behavior here is to show what changes the edit will cause when you hit "save". It's arguable, though. Currently we basically just treat editing an old version like editing the current version and pasting in the old text. That might not be the most obvious way to handle things, but changing it would be a fairly big project, and at least right now it's very simple and consistent once you understand how it works (which can be summarized in about ten words, as I just did).
The way it's supposed to work is to show you the changes you're going to save, so indeed I have to agree that the current behavior is correct.
