SignificantRecentChanges is the correct spelling for
SignficantRecentChanges (created in October 2000).
Would anyone else be interested in helping to maintain and/or read a "significant"
RecentChanges page?
For the past few weeks (before October 9, 2000)
RecentChanges has had a large number of edits that I would call
MinorEdits. Some of these edits are simply adding categories, removing signatures, and small editorial changes. Other edits add only a small amount of content to a page, like adding one more link to a large list. These edits are
good, and totally within the spirit of wiki, but some people would rather not read them.
For extreme
RecentChangesJunkies like myself, this isn't a big problem--it's easy to click through the
QuickChanges diff. Not everyone has as much time for wiki as I do, and if one looks at a 3-day list of
RecentChanges it can be quite daunting to find the good content. The
ChangeSummary experiment of October 1999 was one attempt to find a solution, but writing the summaries took too much effort. (The summary features in
UseModWiki are another experiment to see if contributed summaries are useful.)
Rather than attempting to change (tame?)
RecentChanges, I'm proposing a new "significant" or "substantial"
RecentChanges page. The new page would be manually edited, and would contain a list of pages with "significant" changes. Any editor is free to define what "significant" means to them, but I would recommend a lower bound of two new sentences. (Or a question for the community.) People who feel a change is particularly significant could write a short summary after the change.
For instance, my list of "significant" changes for today (October 9, 10:00am Eastern) might look like:
October 9, 2000 [as of 10:00 am EST]
The list above has 15 pages, taken from a list of 44 on
RecentChanges.
Does this idea sound useful? Unlike the failed
ChangeSummary, it would only list a subset of pages, and summaries would be optional and minimal. --
CliffordAdams (who
obviously hasn't learned his wiki lessons...)
Try putting your own PagesIRefactored on the page named after you?
Well, maybe a next step would be code (not necessarily running at c2.com) that can be used to "moderate" Wiki pages along the lines of
SlashDot. Moderators could choose from:
-2 Just too tacky
-1 About movies, not programming
0 Whatever
+1 Provides a chuckle...
+2 About a movie I like so all programmers would like it too!
+3 Explains why Wiki should/should not stay as it is right now
+4 Mentions XP
+5
WardCunningham explains XP
How about this simple change: Make "I'm just doing minor edit. Please divert the usual logging to
RecentEdits instead." the *default*.?
That would be great! I often forget to check "minor edits" when I quickly want to change a typo or some such, I don't think I would forget it the other way round.
Surely that just means the
RecentChangesJunkies will instead need to keep a closer eye on
RecentEdits? What you
might want is a radio button with default unset. This would solve the problem in an annoying way.
How about this simple change: put the diff size (e.g. -5+15 lines, or something from "diffstat") on the changes list. It doesn't tell of edit quality, or even significance, but a junkie may learn some useful correlations which save them some time.
(That was done by
MediaWiki 1.9, 2007.)
Is the typo in title intentional? --
FedericoLeva
I don't know. It is in OrphanNonHomePages and must have been created in October 2000, so no-one seems to have noticed or they could have corrected it over the years. The fact that it is misspelt will also mean it would not show up in a search for significant. When I created the correct spelling SignificantRecentChanges I found that it already had some links, including on RelevantChangesDiscussion, last edited in 2006, where the misspelling is actually mentioned. As a result of my changes it is no longer an orphan page and the whole subject is better integrated. It could be migrated to the page with the correct spelling. --
JohnFletcher
CategoryWiki