Hallo.
DYK: The first commit in the MediaWiki source repo is the change from
"Older versions" to "Page history".[1]
Does anybody think that calling the "history" tab "history" is really
very
good?
Version "history" is a rather technical term that not all people who aren't
developers necessarily. understand without explanation. This becomes even
more confusing on a site like Wikipedia, many of whose pages deal with
History. This is anecdotal, but I saw people clicking the "History" tab in
the English Wikipedia and getting confused, because they expected to see
stuff about generals, monarchs and discoveries. Calling it "View history"
is not much better.
"Older versions" or "previous versions" or something along these
lines
describes the essence of the link more precisely and clearly.
My home wiki, the Hebrew Wikipedia, calls the history tab "Previous
versions", even though in MessagesHe.php it's translated as "History".
I
went to all the other Wikipedias that have over 50,000 articles and found
interesting results. Wikipedias in 7 languages don't call this tab
"history" or "view history", but rather:
German: Version history
Italian: Chronology
Polish: History and authors
Indonesian: Previous versions
Hebrew: Previous versions
Croatian: Show older changes
Latvian: Chronology
It's not a majority, but it does show some interesting variety, which must
not be ignored.
So I'm asking the experienced design people and anybody else who has an
opinion: Now that we are talking so much about major design changes
(Winter, etc.), can we consider changing this as well?
[1]
http://git.wikimedia.org/commitdiff/mediawiki%2Fcore/bdf01f1062405e1f2b46a9…
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore