Last modified: 2013-09-02 03:38:51 UTC
Hi. "Recent changes" and watchlists show the amount of text added/removed in green/red.[1] But "View history" only shows the total amount of text in each revision, and "User contributions" shows no amount information at all. It would be more useful to see amounts added/removed on all three of these pages, instead of just one.[2][3] This way, we'd instantly know which edits are additions, which are removals, which are big, and which are small. And on "View history", it would be even more useful to see both the amount added/removed and the new total, like this: "+ 100 = 1,100 bytes". This way, we'd be able to more easily check that every malicious blanking of a page that's ever happened has been fully undone. This would be useful on [[en:Labor Ready]] for example. ^ [1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Added_or_removed_characters ^ [2]. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/48841 ^ [3]. [[fr:User:The RedBurn]] has already written a gadget that shows amount added/removed on all history pages you view. It doesn't affect contribs pages. To enable it, edit [[Special:MyPage/skin.js]] and add all this on one line: importScriptURI('http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-HistoryNumDiff.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
You might think this shouldn't be implemented until after bug 25198 ("Please display revision length in characters, not bytes, in history and Recent Changes"). But I think this would be useful even if bug 25198 were never implemented.
Adding this to history pages is a dupe of bug 24419.
*** Bug 24419 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This requested feature is available if going to your Preferences, and, in the section "User interface gadgets", activating "HistoryNumDiff shows the number of characters added or removed, rather than the size of the revision." However, I'd still like to have the option to see BOTH the size and the difference.
+1 to the option of seeing both. Copying from bug 24419: Revision size and revision bytes change are _both_ extremely useful, giving a good "quick idea" of a page's history or a user's pattern of contributing, especially on talk pages where size change helps to visually identify reductions in page size, often signs of vandalism, removal of comments, archiving, etc which are of interest. I'd like to see page size as SIZE bytes (+/-CHANGE) on both contribs and history. A revision that is 10000 bytes in size and a reduction of 100 bytes from the previous revision would be shown as 10000 bytes (-100) with the -100 in bold red for visual ease. Also some kind of higher visibility tag, like a symbol next to the byte field, for larger additions/removals (say > 400 bytes?). It can be useful to quickly see the key points in a talk or project page history where significant additions or removals happened, and in a user's contributions which edits were of that kind.
Agree with FT2 above. The difference matters at least as much as size.
(In reply to comment #4) > This requested feature is available if going to your Preferences, and, in the > section "User interface gadgets", activating "HistoryNumDiff That only works on en.wikipedia and requires a piece of JavaScript. Not a fix for this request to add it in MediaWiki software itself. What that gadget does or doesn't do shouldn't be topic of this ticket, although it can be used as inspiration and/or suggestion for implementation method, it's not part of the software. It hasn't been added to core at all right now, so if/when it will be added the size will most likely not be removed.
Ok, that explains why nothing happened after I checked that box.
What should be the interface? Something like this? 19:57, 9 March 2011 Krinkle (talk | contribs) m (5,244 bytes | -1 bytes ) Edit summary
19:57, 9 March 2011 Krinkle (talk | contribs) m 5,244 bytes (-100) Edit summary No need to repeat "bytes" and the layout is possibly more intuitive ("SIZE bytes" is easily understood and if given, then "(+/- DIFFSIZE)" will be fairly intuitive)
fixed by r100722
Thank you very much!