[WikiEN-l] Problem with the pending changes review screen.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Imagine an article with many revisions and pending changes enabled:
> A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
[snip]
> I don't know how to fix this. We could remove the reject button to
> make it more clear that you use the normal editing functions (with
> their full power) to reject.  But I must admit that the easy rollback
> button is handy there.   Alternatively we could put a small chunk of
> the edit history on the review page, showing the individual edits
> which comprise the span-diff (bonus points for color-coding if someone
> wants to make a real programming project out of it) along with the
> undo links and such.
[snip]


Further discussion with Risker has caused me to realize that there is
another significant problem situation with the reject button.

Consider the following edit sequence:

A, B, C, D, E


A is a previously approved version.  B, and D are all excellent edits.
 C and E are obvious vandalism.  E even managed to undo all the good
changes of B,D while adding the vandalism.

A reviewer hits the pending revisions link in order to review, they
get the span diff from A to E.  All they see is vandalism, there is no
indication of the redeeming edits in the intervening span.  So they
hit reject.  The good edits are lost.


Unlike the prior problem, the only way to solve this would be only
display the REJECT button if all of the pending changes are by the
same author (or limiting it to only one pending change in the span,
which would be slightly more conservative but considering the
behaviour of the rollback button I think the group-by-author behaviour
would be fine).   The accept button is still safe.