While watching Wikipedia, again and again I've encountered the following issue: I visit my watchlist after several days, so there are many changes. I start by looking at the oldest ones. I see that someone edited some article. I look at the changes, I see they are counterproductive, so I want to revert them. But I click on revert, and the software informs me that the changes have already been reverted. If the reversion had been on the same day, the changes would have been grouped together and I wouldn't have wasted my time. But if the reversion wasn't in the same day, the changes aren't grouped together, and so I'm less likely to see them. At first sight then, it would make more sense to group the changes by title first, date later, to avoid these unnecessary mistakes and give a quicker and more accurate overview of the changes to each article since we last visited the watchlist. Is there some reason not to?
Description
Related Objects
- Mentioned Here
- T37785: Make enhanced recentchanges the default
Event Timeline
You mean like "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" under the Recent changes preferences tab?
AFAICS this was already fixed in MediaWiki 1.25, T37785. Please enable the preference in your account: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Enhanced_recent_changes
If that's what you mean, we can make this a site request to adopt the default on Wikimedia wikis too. Otherwise, you'll need to specify what you actually want.
Ah, I see "if the reversion wasn't in the same day, the changes aren't grouped together". So this is about enhanced recent changes. I agree that's something we can improve. So you mean that we should put all changes to a page in the group of the last day?
I mean grouping changes by page even when the changes were done on different days. Putting all changes to a page in the group of the last day would be one way to implement it.
Another possibility would be the following: in the current watchlist, changes are grouped by date first and there is a <h4> heading for each date. Instead of this, changes could be grouped by title first, and each <h4> heading would be the title of an article that underwent changes. Like so:
Philosophy
- Aug 8, 03:05 (diff | hist) . . (-115) . . Someone (talk | contribs) (Reverted the changes by 190.224.208.78)
- Aug 6, 01:03 (diff | hist) . . (+115) . . 190.224.208.78 (talk) (→Philosophy)
Talk:Philosophy
- Aug 8, 17:55 (diff | hist) . . (+253) . . Joe Doe (talk | contribs) (→Talk:Philosophy)
- Aug 4, 10:05 (diff | hist) . . (+2040) . . Tester (talk | contribs) (Reverted the changes by 192.204.821.170)
- Aug 4, 10:03 (diff | hist) . . (-2040) . . 192.204.821.170 (talk) (→Talk:Philosophy)
Notice how the date is now prefixed to the time, as the heading no longer indicates it. The bold text indicates changes that haven't been reviewed yet (as always). This restructuring of the watchlist may bring some new problems, I'm not sure, but to me at least it seems like the right way to solve the issue, as well as an overall clearer way to display the latest changes.
@lfschenone: So is this a site request to adopt the default on Wikimedia wikis? If so, feel free to edit the task by removing MediaWiki-Watchlist and adding Wikimedia-Site-requests.