On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 2:37 AM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.com wrote:
On 07/28/2010 04:57 AM, Jason Spiro wrote:
I think it would be nice for both "View history"[1] and "User contributions" to show bytes added/removed. This would make it easier to distinguish between small contributions from big ones: between multiple-sentence additions and small typo fixes.
I'm not sure we should even show byte counts by default. It must be very confusing for newbies (especially if they don't know what a byte is). And it clutters up the UI. Perhaps make it optional and disable by default? It's mostly targeted at experienced users anyway. If we'd make it optional, I don't think your proposal would be any problem (and as a Wikipedian I'd love to have that feature!).
-- Tobias (User:Church of emacs)
Newbies know what characters are, and the byte counts are really just character counts. If someone wants to see page history, then they probably also would benefit from knowing which edits are text additions and which are text removals, no?
Has anyone ever done usability studies of newbies -- new Internet users, experienced Internet users who are non-editors, or new editors? Have the study conductors watched how they play with the history tools?
Maybe you and I should each ask our moms to try the history tools and see how they react to seeing the history screens and the byte counts on those screens.
By the way, why does page history say "12,345 bytes" and not "12,345 characters"?