Extension talk:RevisionSlider

This is the feedback page for the RevisionSlider extension. Read about what we've learned about creating a RTL-accessible extension. Please report all RTL-related issues on this talk page!

Its right now I think the vertical bars do not have enough room to show the potential difference in changes. For example you can just barley tell between something thats a minor grammatical change and something that has rewritten half the page. It would be useful if there was some option to expand the page.

I'm really curious, but need a screenshot or example page to understand the problem better. As of now the graph is logarithmic and dynamically scales so that the biggest change takes up 100% of the available height, with all other changes scaled accordingly. It's mathematically not possible for a minor change to look identical to a rewrite. Not even when a page's history contains a change that replaced the entire page.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T323756

Hi! Love your work and was curious if it would be possible to render with some distinction big periods of non-editing time as gaps?

It would be great to start with visualization showing the waveform of actual start to present with gaps *(even if that view is just one static image at the start), so that one can see quickly what was chronological dynamics over time.

Or maybe just indicate years on the histogram chart.

Thank you for the praise and your suggestion, @Zblace. I have a created a Phabricator ticket so we will have this on our radar if we pick up working on the RevisionSlider again. This is currently not planned, though.

Best,

Johanna

I am so grateful you have introduce this function, and I apply it to my day-to-day editing. One small request will be that on mobile screens, the dot/circle buttons could be a bit larger/taller/fatter when you pull to the left/right and change comparing revisions. I mean, of course this functionality needs not be developed to fit to mobile screens, I can’t live without it even when I am working on my i-Phone. Is it possible to maybe:

• diminish the number of revision bars (vertical ones), so that literally you will have fatter/wider bars which can accommodate larger dot/circle buttons ? Or;
• add "expand" function to enlarge the diagram itself, which I manually do at the moment?

Thank you, hardworking team ! --Omotecho (talk) 16:34, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

@Omotecho Thanks a lot for your kind words and your feedback. I have passed it on to the development team in a Phabricator ticket (T283135). We're not currently working on RevisionSlider, but with the ticket, we have your suggestion on our radar.

Have a good day!

Johanna

This is a good step forward when attempting to find where a change has originated, kudos to those involved.

@Southof40ː Thanks for the praise. We're happy you like it.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Johanna

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T187706

Very good addition, thanks.

Suggestion: add an icon above a bar, if there are edits on the Talk page from the same day. Or maybe, to refine better, edits from the same day by the same user. Or a counter of the number of Talk edits.

Issue: I do feel that the diff page respondes more than a little slowly, at least after loading several diffs in a row. But that's Firefox for you (v56, win10).

Hey @Danny lost,

thanks for the feedback and the suggestion.

To get a better understanding on what you mean: So the idea would be, to show these icons/tags/numbers that relate to the talk page of an article on the RevisionSlider view of the actual article page right? Can you give an example on how this would help you in your work? :-) - That would be really great.

Thanks again,

Christoph

Yes, clues about the talk-page, in the article-RevisionSlider. On the one hand, most article changes are not accompanied by talk-page discussion. On the other hand, some cases of dense activity are the result of counterpart activity on the talk-page. The edit summary is not a reliable clue for whether there was a discussion, let alone what was said there. On active articles, going through the talk-page is a time consuming effort.

Let's say I visited an article in the past, and now on a second visit I see a lot has changed, some of it not for the better. I want to see what led to this and open the Slider. I can see when some sentence was removed, but not if someone gave a good reason for this. If there was a talk-page indication, I can jump to that discussion and see if this was the result of an edit war, a compromise, or maybe an undiscussed change. Maybe I'll learn that this is a repeating issue, that there are previous Admin decisions, and so on.

Cool, thanks for that detailed explanation. I created a Phabricator ticket so we have the feature request on our monitors and it could be considered in the future.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T163366

Problem

As a user, I am unable to easily see significant disruptive or constructive changes have been made to an article.

As a reader, I unable to easily evaluate the history of a page to evaluate its potential bias.

Background

One of the main problems with the regular history is that everything is jumbled up. The history page simply lays out information without highlighting anything, and revision slider makes things somewhat worse because one can only see the summary after hovering. This means that it is hard to note if the article content was completely modified after years of existence, if it was suddenly blanked, or if it had considerable reverts.

Proposed solutions

Add some markers to denote some of these changes. Some of these can be detected using the automatic edit summary (Help:Automatic_edit_summaries), e.g.:

• Red bar - whenever a newer revision is completely blank
• Red bar - whenever a revision shows more than 70% of the content being removed
• Orange bar - indicating a revert, if two adjacent revisions have the exact same sha1 hash

Other ideas include:

• Highlight the most repeated revisions - by verifying a group of revisions that has the same content or sha1. This would be a possible indicator of revert or edit disagreements without even looking at all of them individually.
• Highlight main contributor -show clusters of revisions done by major user. No matter what, a page created by a single user will always contain their biases, and is less likely to be reliable.

Hey and thanks for the suggestion!

I created a Phabricator ticket with your Ideas so we can keep track of it and might consider it for future versions of the RevisonSlider. You can find the ticket here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T163366

Best,

Christoph

I find the vertical scale unintelligible. Why do selected revisions have bars going up, and some have bars going down? And why are the bars different lengths

Singed off Foiled circuitous wanderer

Hi @Foiled circuitous wanderer,

the vertical scale of the slider represents the general size of the change done to a revision. The bigger the bar the bigger the change. - If the bar goes up it means that there was more text added to a revision than removed. If the bar goes down it's the other way around.

I hope that clears things up for you :-),

best,

Christoph

I feel like this is quite intuitive for programmers used to versioning and diff software, such as Git, SVN, KDiff, WinMerge etc. but to everyone else it's probably unclear.

I am a programmer, so I am not sure if I might be underestimating non-programmers in this case.

Side note: Personally, I love the Revision Slider and I see myself using it a lot!

What is it used for? What does it do? It’s so confusing, should be more intuitive otherwise seems useless to me.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T211557

Hello there. In our wiki, the sidebar contains collapsible items. When using the Revision slider, all items in the sidebar are suddenly shown expanded and the small triangle to collapse the subitems are gone. As soon as I change to any other article, the sidebar is shown correctly.

This happens under Mediawiki 1.27 as well as 1.31. I use the vector skin, and I have also installed the "CollapsibleVector" extension.

Uh. Are you able to tell us what exactly "our wiki" is? PS: I found the issue. Unfortunately it seems there is no easy, quick fix. I created phab:T211557 to help us keep track of it. Additional input and ideas are welcome.

You can see it here: https://test.perrypedia.proc.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Perrypedia%3AWillkommen&type=revision&diff=1364380&oldid=1363459

When first opening the page, the items in the sidebar are collapsible. Now open the RevisionSlider; they are still collapsible. Now move any of the sliders: the sidebar changes to non-collapsible.

This is, of course, a minor problem. Eventually the RevisionSlider is a great thing and very useful for us.

Great tool to review changes to my translation/edits. No more hussle going back and forth between tabs. Appreciate very much to have editors move between eds and save time/energy and this smoothly.

Thank you for the great feedback, this means a lot to us :-)