Last modified: 2006-10-20 19:57:50 UTC
Hello everybody, Here is a little idea. History actually lists all vandalisms and tests that some users/IPs made, at the same level as all the useful contributions (the one that are really needed by GFDL). Although it is certainly useful for sociologists studying Wikipedia, it is not for usual readers and it gives a bad feeling to some people that come from time to time to request us, admin, to delete those edits from article history. But it is impossible to accept their request. We can't delete 10s of times an article due to vandalism or kids testing, that would make maintenance impossible. It would be cool to be able to set an "irrelevent" flag attached to an edit that prevents it to be displayed among the others in the history, except for admins who certainly need this kind of information. For example, a revert could set auomatically this flag for the whole set of reverted edits (and on the revert itself, probably). And for past edits, a little link on the side of edits in history panel or under edits title when viewing revision (like the one for patrolled edit) should do the job. At the contrary, these irrelevent edits should still be listed in the editor's list of edits, so that people can see whether the editor's usual work is correct or not (for an adminship request, for example). Crediting vandals is just weird and it makes history less usable (some users even use javascript coloring on it, now). What do you think about it? Regards, Eden2004
Oh, by the way, I know some people not administrators would want to see those vandalisms. Maybe a preference settings would be useful... Eden2004
Ok, sorry, that just remind me we had a desision made half a year ago about this, asking to not modify the history for these kind of stuffs by a wide majority (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Prise_de_d%C3%A9cision/Int%C3%A9grit%C3%A9_des_historiques, but maybe with a good description of what could be hidden, the result would have been diffirent). So this preference setting is really a requirement, in case you consider this feature useful. Eden2004
Ok, here is a short summary of our discussion: * "Irrelevent" flag can be set per edit. * User can choose with User preference between complete history or clean history. * On the history page, a link allows to see the list visible in the other mode (so complete for the one who chose clean, clean for the one who chose complete). * "Irrelevent edit" still accessible through permalink and still listed in user contribution list. * Admin's reverts automaticaly set "irrelevent" on reverted edits. Can also be set on history page by admin and if possible, on diff. Useful and flexible enough to permit different uses. What do you thing of this proposal ? Eden2004
I think bug 3640 would solve this, yes? The flag could be auto-set on rollback for the rollback and all rolled-back edits, and on manual reverts as well if the saved version exactly matches the version edited. Such edits definitely shouldn't be completely hidden by default, though, even from page history. They should just be collapsed, perhaps, or grayed out and italicized, or whatever.
Hi Simetrical, Yes, I think it's the same idea. I was thinking at the fact that a real clean history would be especially great for a DVD version (as we have to provide history -or link to history- with articles). But yes, maybe grayed or stricked out is enough. I let you make the wisest choice. (Pretty incredible that we had a similar idea with just two weeks interval o_O) Eden2004
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 3640 ***
