Magnus Manske magnus.manske@epost.de writes:
After the last update which included the links to the user:discussion page (which is certainly useful) I have problems to scan RecentChanges for the really important things, i.e. the articles which were modified. In English it is not such a big problem because "diff" and "hist" and "talk" (and "block") are a lot shorter than "Unterschied" "Versionen", "Diskussion" and "blockieren" but German RecentChanges are at the moment almost unreadable for me.
Ich empfehle die Einstellung "Erweiterte letzte Änderungen" :-) Recommending "Extended Recent Changes"
*oops* I didn't notice these were already incorporated. But actually, it made things only worse. Now I have "Änderungen, Versionen", "Aktuell, Letzte" "(2x)" or "(3x)" and a list of all people who changed something...
I asked my boyfriend to simulate a newbie who is trying to understand what all this does - it took us quite some time to figure out what each link actually does.
Some questions: - are the times a user changed something (2x) really worth being displayed? You have the overall number of changes and if you display the thread you can count the per-user changes. - Am I right in guessing that the line which is displayed in the "closed" state and the first line of the "opened" state refer to the same edit? - Does "Aktuell" (or "cur") actually show the diff to the _last_ edit, i.e. does it do the same as the link which is titled "Unterschied" or "diff" in the old recentchanges? - Does "Änderungen" ("changes") at multiple edits do the same as "Aktuell" ("cur") at a single edit (which does the same...see above)? - how many people use/need/like the history link on recentchanges? I just realized I never use it. I use "diff" to see the modifications or I read the article and eventually go from there to the history if I am interested in it. I dare to say that the history is only of interest if one has already read the article.
suggestions for both versions of recent changes: - use the tool tips to display something useful, pleeaaase! at the moment diff, hist, changes, older versions, cur, last, next, the article link itself and whatever display all the same: the article title! I dream of something like "display differences to the last version" or "edit history of the article". (The German Wikipedia has no tool tips at all) -exclude the history links (if there are no protests of people who use them)
suggestions for the modern recentchanges: -exclude the "(2x, 3x...)" -use the same names for the same things (older version=hist, changes=cur=diff)
other suggestions: - provide a link from Special:Preferences to the explanation of all the settings at: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AUser_preferences_help and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AHandbuch_-_Einstellungen it is necessary, really...
comparison table: en: diff hist talk block de: Unterschied Versionen Diskussion blockieren
Vielleicht als Kürzel? / How about "pseudo-icons"? de (neu) : [-] [...] [D:] [X]
d for Diskussion and x for block are fine (I have a webcommunity in which admins can delete stuff (even whole users) with an "x", but despite my fears I never accidentally deleted something in two years) u for "Unterschied", v for "Versionen" combined with a good description in the tooltips and/or in the introduction (next to "Below are..") should help, too.
I really like the lots of functions the wikipedia software provides but I fear we steer too much away from the original wiki concept of "keeping it simple".
greetings, elian