Last modified: 2008-10-06 16:13:12 UTC
problem: I patrol a few hundred articles on Wikipedia, at least glancing at all edits in each, and in recent months someone has helpfully changed the normal Wikipedia behavior by 'streamlining' annoying displays of intermediate edits, thus benefiting us all by hiding some or several previous edits. "So many intermediate edits not shown" has become a informational message from the Infernal Regions in consequence. The presentation of the difference display from 'edit history' now doesn't bother with showing them if one selects a diff more than a few edits wide, making things more difficult. So a heavily trafficed article might have 15-20 changes in the last 24 hours (since last check) which require checking, and if 13-19 of them are intermediate edits not shown, checking them becomes quite difficult. Vandalism survives longer, sensible edits don't get done, and so on. suggestion: I suggest an option -- global would be fine in my case not necessarily per session or page history diff display -- which shows all intermediate edits, or the last x edits (with x perhaps settable by the editor?), or the current behavior. why bother: The point of fixing this bug -- or modifying this feature, depending on perspective -- is to more efficient use of the available editor time of those who watchlist WP articles for supervision and review.
If the current revision is vandalized, won't that be apparent in the diff? Unless it was already reverted, but then that means that vandalism is not lasting any longer.
The difficulty is not so much rvv for recent posts by the socially retarded malicious -- especially the most recent such posting. It's article maintenance over time, really. Say that 20 edits were made in the last day (ie, since I last came by the article -- and I check (or used to until this 'feature' was installed) every edit in my watchlisted articles), this 'feature has the effect of concealing nearly all of those edits. Perhaps they would be fine additions to that WP article, or perhaps not, but if concealed in this way, some -- in practice most -- escape my patrolling eye. For some of these articles, I appear to be the only regular patrolling eye...
From the united diff page, simply click Previous diff, then Next diff, which will get you to the first diff that was part of the united diff. From there, you can easily walk through all diffs with the Next diff link.
