Wow, the idea of playbacking the changes is indeed very cool. I remember something similar has been done for the Google Wave project. Here is an example of similar thing for viewing comments:
http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2009/10/google-wave-history-slider-jquery/demo....
Howadays the history and the diff are not very usable, I agree that we need to search for the alternative representations.
Our team is working on visual diff and we have some results, but there are many more things that we want to change in MediaWiki user experience. I will be glad to help you with the brainstorming (also adding a colleague of mine to the discussion) . ----- Yury Katkov, WikiVote
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 12:58 AM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I'm interested in getting a few interested people together to talk about possible solutions for viewing diffs (including previewing changes) and handling edit conflicts for VisualEditor.
We don't need to do anything formal really - if you are particularly interested in getting involved let me know. If there are a few of us I will throw a short brainstorming session together and we can go from there.
Just to throw something out there to give you a feel for what little we have considered in this area: it is possible to utilize the granular history data we capture for undo/redo purposes to support playback. This would give the user a time-slider that takes the document from one state to another, and a play button to animate between these states. This is usually considered to be a "cool" idea, but we don't know that it's practical or respectful enough of people's privacy.
I think this is an exciting area of VisualEditor with few restrictions and almost no existing ideas or plans, which makes it possible for us to come up with radical solutions and make them a reality.
- Trevor
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