[Crossposted to wikien-l and wikitech-l.]
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:09:22 -0500, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
When I met Seth, he explained to me how this happened. The vandal used a classic trick... the double edit. The first edit was the vandalism, the second edit was innocent. So if you checked the diffs incorrectly, you would not see the attack paragraph.
Hell yes. I see that a lot.
Presumably this is something that could be countered by technical fixes. Admin rollback already automatically reverts multiple consecutive edits from the same editor; the manifest usefulness of this feature would be one more argument for granting rollback privileges to non-admins. But _seeing_ the sum of the edits should definitely be made easier: I think that the diff links in the watchlist, at least, should automatically show all the combined edits made by the last editor.
It'd also be nice if the diff view showed how many edits there are between the two revisions being compared; besides being, IMO, a good thing in general, this would help make the change I proposed above less confusing.
I don't think this should be particularly hard to implement. What I'd like is comments on whether this would actually be a good idea, and suggestions on where else, besides the watchlist, it should be applied.
(At the risk of [[WP:BEANS]], I'd like to note that there is another related problem; if a vandal blanks the section of an article containing the interlanguage links, a bot will often quickly show up to restore them, as a side effect hiding the vandalism itself from the watchlist. Making the bots smarter would help, but I'm not sure what can be done to solve this problem in general, beyond hiding bot edits from the watchlist by default and making the feature actually do what it should do -- i.e. show the last non-bot edit instead.)