Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:22 UTC
I anticipate this enhancement request has already been done before, but I haven't found it. It would be a very helpful improvement to make MediaWiki merge multiple edits of an article by the same user which are done in a specific time span, say 30 minutes. Although experienced wiki users often use the preview function and don't submit before the worked out their final version of the article, new users tend to perform several edits, which do all appear in the history, of course. My personal judgement says it'd be technically possible, but I might be wrong. What do you say about it?
Well, to begin with, what would you do with the edit summaries? And timestamps? And revision IDs? What if you wanted to revert the last edit someone made but not any preceding edits? If someone makes a change and then self-reverts, do we really want to obliterate all evidence of it? What, in fact, are you asking for, exactly? If clogging up the history is an issue, then suggest that they be somehow visually condensed on the history page and that they be considered a single edit for the purposes of deciding how many revisions to provide. If you just want an easy link to diff all consecutive changes, then ask for that. And if you want a way to count consecutive edits as one for the purposes of editcountosis, ask Interiot or whoever. This bug isn't clear about what it wants.
I'm going to go ahead and WONTFIX this since it would destroy history information taken literally, and we couldn't accept that. Collapsing consecutive items in history view would probably be considered nice by some people, but would not destroy information or links. If desired, please open a separate item for that to avoid confusion on this bug.
*** Bug 2957 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 7900 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'm sorry, Brion, with all due respect, but in your rationale for WONTFIXing this, I don't see a reason why it is imperative that we make a difference between an edit that was done in one go or with intermediate previews, and one that was done with intermediate saves. As long as there's no edit by another editor in between, these two are for all intents and purposes the same. In fact, other wikis treat them the same. Why make things unnecessarily complicated?
Closing per serious issues in #1 and #2.
