On 4/6/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm ... could give unexpected results. "That's not the text I entered!" And bug reports.
We get that today.. except now it's the form of old versions mysteriously changing even though they can't be edited. With no obvious record of the changes.. and no easy way to confirm you weren't imagining what you saw the day before.
OTOH, MediaWiki reporting it fixed syntax problems might be enough.
We could also go to a hybrid approach once we get revision tagging: include a syntax checker (which could also check for other more style related issue), and then only allow people to set certain revision tags on revisions that pass the test... i.e. the articles overall syntax might be crud, but the stable version will always check okay. This will give a nice series of milestone versions which are not only good to human eyes, but also stand a chance of staying that way as the machinery changes.
OTOOH, correcting a typo and getting back that 20 other changes have been made could be ... doing the unexpected.
Right.. There lies the rub.