On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:02:07 -0800, Kesava Mallela kesava@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia shows only the last edit of an article in the watch list.This leaves the writer no clue of the edits that took place from his/her base lined version. (Base lined version will generally be the user's last edit on the article.). Some kind of visualization technique on all the edits only can give the writer a sense of the course taken by the article.
I believe work related to the "e-notif" patch has implemented a link which shows the difference between the current version and the version that you last viewed, which goes some way towards this. That doesn't, of course, give you the list of *summaries* for those edits, but you can get that out of the page history easily enough anyway, I guess.
As for visualising a whole sequence of edits, that's certainly a laudable aim, but in practice it's not so easy. For the moment, you can page through the diffs (with the new "next" and "previous" links). Some people have suggested a "blame" feature (like CVS repositories provide) which shows in which edit each part of an article was introduced; but it has been pointed out that unlike source code, encyclopedia articles [or other content likely to be contained in a MediaWiki] doesn't divide neatly into lines, so the resulting display would be that much coarser, and thus less useful - I might correct one typo, and the whole paragraph would end up annotated as my edit. And then there was IBM's "history flow" experiment [http://www.research.ibm.com/history/index.htm] which is certainly fascinating, but whether or not it can be put to generic and practical use I'm not sure...
Meanwhile, some overall container which could provide standard features and interface to Special:Recentchanges, Special:Recentchangeslinked and Special:Watchlist would certainly be nice - for instance, the global recent changes is filterable and has collapsible groupings for multiple edits to the same article. Obviously, some things are harder in the database than others, but it would certainly be useful for all three pages to have this and more...