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Community Wishlist/Wishes/A way to filter edits by Citation bot, InternetArchiveBot and OAbot from diffs

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A way to filter edits by Citation bot, InternetArchiveBot and OAbot from diffs Open

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Description

Changes by these bots can clutter diffs and cost Wikipedia editors a lot of time where they have go through much longer and cluttered diffs.

Please enable excluding these bots' changes from the diffs when there have been edits to a page by not just, but including, any of these bots. There is a tool to show "since last seen" diffs on the Watchlist and I'd like to have these diffs exclude bots' changes.
(One can also spend extra time if one does not use such a tool and manually go to each page's history page, then look for the oldest item without a green dot for 'changed since last visit', click that revision, and then click "Compare selected revisions". And I don't know why editors put up with this instead of there being a 'since last seen diff' link by default.)

If one has many articles on the Watchlist and wants to check all of them or as many as possible, this takes a lot of time. It also takes more effort to see the semantic changes done by human editors when diffs are very long and cluttered with such bot changes. This filter could save a lot of valuable editors' time which they can use for other things.

These bots are very useful and when their changes are filtered out from a diff there could be a note at the top such as "1 edit by Citation bot is hidden, visit the revision history to check its change". The diff url could have a parameter such as ?filtereb=1 set but that isn't required.

See for example this diff. Note: with this bot filtering in this case there would be "(No difference)" and as a second step I'd also propose that items that are not changing a page can also be hidden or are displayed differently on the Watchlist. More often, the actual change becomes much clearer and easy to see when common established-bot edits are excluded (example). The latter could be improved further if diffs better understood when text segments have only been moved around.

It would reduce the time and effort needed to scan through diffs because diffs are not cluttered by cosmetic and minor changes to citation parameters and so on.

There may be a couple additional bots one may consider adding to the list of bots whose changes can be excluded like GreenC bot, WikiCleanerBot, and maybe ClueBot.

This proposal is quite important because it could save a lot of time which Wikimedians could use for anything else people may consider important – I generally personally prioritize proposals that save significant contributor's time or make them more productive because that seems like an efficient way to get the projects forward as they could use that time for anything else (from writing articles to implementing wishes in code or working on making the sites better known and more successful).

There is phab:T302921 but it was closed because the Watchlist has a feature to hide all bot edits so this is about diffs so maybe a new issue should be created about diffs in specific.

Assigned focus area

Make it easier for patrollers and other editors to prioritize tasks

Type of wish

Feature request

Wikipedia

Affected users

Active Wikipedia editors

Other details

  • Created: 12:26, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 02:09, 25 September 2024 (UTC)
  • Author: Prototyperspective (talk)