If we want to collect granular data about the edit interface or the client used to complete an edit, the only options on the table are (1) MediaWiki tags or (2) instrumentation via EventLogging.
MediaWiki tags
unless you concatenate in a single tag all relevant metadata (uggh) , they will only capture some very high level property of the revision
they are public data, exposed in revision histories, recentchanges etc
they provide hook for functionality (useful if we think people will build gadgets)
there are community expectations on what tags are good for or not that we need to be aware of
EventLogging instrumentation
it would allow to capture granular information about the edit in a structured way and without the limitations of MediaWiki tags
data collected via EventLogging is currently not published/replicated to labs. This is not because the information collected is private based on the terms of the privacy policy but because we havent worked yet on a solution to expose this data.
EL data cannot be read off from MediaWiki, so if the plan is to enable functionality in MediaWiki based on tags, this is not an option
Of course a combination of the two is also possible.
The relevant questions to ask are:
how much information needs to be captured in a tag?
is this data meant to be public?
are tags expected to provide hooks for functionality in MediaWiki or are they for analytics purposes only?
Dario
PS the same problems of what tags to use applies to account registrations, not just revisions
Makes sense to me the other option would be to automatically generate a string in the edit summary, like vandalfighting and semi-automated editing tools do. Tags can be a little finicky to work with when you're doing data processing & analysis, because they require joining with the revision table on revision IDs. If we're capturing the relevant info in the edit summary, that's stored in the revision table and thus requires one less extra join step :)
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