Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

Issue:

It seems that currently the Diff tool just links people to the diff page, and many users may not know anything about diffs.

Proposed solution:

Use feedback tool add the diff to page

Alternative:

Use Help:Structured Discussions/Preloading .

A Feedback form with placeholder fields or simply text (e.g. "Problem: , Where: Using what feature", would also be a good idea. The current one is just adds a link, and is probably the source of a lot of empty feedback for people who just experiment with clicking buttons.

Example of a confused user who clearly doesn't know how to find a diff:https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Uiu1bcfx0jvbe3jg&action=history

Funny thing is that Mediawiki.org itself doesn't even have reasonable documentation about how to link to a diff. Despite a lot of help pages / feedback and even the how to report bug page asking for "diffs".

It seems like a classic case caused by the Burden of experience.

From inside the editor (i.e., you're looking at the diff, but you haven't published your changes yet), it's impossible to create the diff URL. The revision id that's needed for the URL isn't assigned until the change is saved.

This is true, but visualeditor (and all sensible editing tools) always knows what the previous / current revision was, from a user's perspective. Linking to that is better than simply linking to the page itself.

In fact, in many cases it will be more productive to link to that. Sometimes the user is having trouble saving the page, so the revision they are editing is a more useful reference than the current page simply because in many cases the page be edited several times.