On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 5:46 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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it was only when I gave it a last try all the way back to December, that I figured it out: 2 entire substantial sections had gotten deleted.
Goodness. That reminds me of the problem there used to be with unclosed ref tags leading to articles truncating on the screen at the point the closing ref tag was missing. The text was all there, just not displaying. I think that got fixed when someone tweaked Mediawiki to jump and down and produce flashing red warning lights when this happens.
Something like removal of entire section can be picked up by edit filters, but you still need people to check the filters and decide which edits are good and which are bad. I had an edit filter set up to detect the removal of "Category:Living people" from articles, but stopped following it after a few weeks when I realised that most of the edits were being reverted for other reasons before I had a chance to check (some way was needed to *flag* which edits had been dealt with or not).
Funny that, you know, flagging of edits. I first encountered a form of that on wikisource. Some form of flagged revisions might happen on en-Wikipedia some day as well, but it is quite a culture change to get used to. Hopefully when it happens, people will adapt quickly (ditto for LiquidThreads).
In fact, that has been my major worry about both Flagged Revisions and LiquidThreads. Will people get turned off by the new user interfaces if they don't like them? How do you implement major changes like this without breaking parts of what currently exist?
Carcharoth