Hello developers,

I have an itch that I'm interested in scratching. When editing but before saving changes, I find myself wishing I could see a diff between the current version and my revision, so I can more accurately state for the edit summary what I had changed.

I'm thinking of a "Preview with diff" feature that would let me see my changes not only in terms of what the page will look like but also in terms of what the diff will be, before the page is saved. In other words, invoking the feature would show the tentative diff above and the tentative changes below, in the same manner that actual diffs are shown.

This feature might be integrated as a user preference so that a new button doesn't have to be added to the editing interface; enabling this feature would cause all invocations of the Preview feature to include the diff. (There may be better ways of providing access to this feature; this is just what came to mind first.)

I didn't spot this idea mentioned in previous discussions on this list or wikimedia.org when I briefly searched for it. Has this been considered before? If so, please point me to the pertinent discussion so I can understand the issues involved. If not, what are your thoughts about this--does it sound useful? What are some of the potential pitfalls?

If this idea sounds reasonable to members of this list, I'm willing to try to implement it myself, although any help would of course be welcome.

Best wishes, Alan