Topic on Extension talk:RevisionSlider

Currently, the bars are showing the change in page size. This is nice, but it's not the most important aspect about an edit to the page. If someone would replace every letter of the page with an x, it wouldn't change the page size.

Maybe you could make the bars represent the "total of characters changed"? So that adding or removing a letter equals 1, but replacing a letter with another equals 2 ticks in the bar height, because it is actually 2 changes (removing and then adding)?

The bars could then sit on a baseline, with only one direction to show the total changes.

Alternatively, the bars could show the characters added on the top of the baseline, and the characters removed could be on the bottom. This would be a lot of useful info in one view.

You explained the idea really well. Thanks for that! We discussed this several times (just recently here). Unfortunately it's a hard problem. Not only is a "number of characters that actually changed" nowhere to be found in the database. It's not possible to reliably calculate it. Any number would be a questionable estimate. For example, what if a paragraph was moved but no other change made? Technically the new version contains all the same characters as before. How to visualize this? Something like -500/+500 wouldn't be correct because these 500 characters aren't removed from the article. They just moved to another position. Should we estimate the minimal number of keystrokes it takes for a cut and paste operation? Or should it be 0 because nothing actually changed? Which is what currently happens.

Personally I like the idea very much. But I'm afraid it's not possible.

Thank you for the quick reply. I see now that this is really much harder than I initially thought.