On Wednesday 05 February 2003 05:34 am, wikitech-l-request@wikipedia.org wrote:

We could save a lot of space by summarizing directly subsequent edits made by one user into a single edit. User foo edits article bar 10 times, and for each edit, the previous one is deleted. This would also reduce clutter in RC. Just check if OLD contains a top revision by the same user and delete it before inserting the new row (preferably as one transaction).

To avoid involuntary overwriting of one's own words, we could do this only if the previous edit had no edit comment, and occurred less than 10 minutes ago.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik

Although I love the idea I do fear that information may be lost. For example I will often completely rewrite an article on a temp page, check it, then paste that text into the main article stating that the article had been completely rewritten. Then when I reread it a second time I often find an embarrassing typo within 5 minutes. I then edit the article and say in the edit summary "typo". It would be very bad if "typo" showed-up as the only comment on the combined edit.

IMO it would also be good to set the combine edit timeout at an hour or maybe even all subsequent edits made in the same UTC day (my personal favorite). So how about this:

Combine all the comments in the order in which they were made and separate them with a semicolon. For example:

(cur) (last) . . M 21:07 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (typo) (cur) (last) . . 20:46 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (opps - forgot some stuff) (cur) (last) . . 20:28 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (new format ready for general wikipedia consumption -- enjoy)

would become:

(cur) (last) . . 20:28 - 21:07 Jun 17, 2002 . . Maveric149 (new format ready for general wikipedia consumption -- enjoy ; opps - forgot some stuff ; M typo)

Notice the range of times given. Combining comments would also mean that we should allow more text in the combined edit summary than we would allow in a single edit summary since the combined edit comment will often be larger than a regular edit comment.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)