Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Add filters to history pages

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Add filters to history pages

  • Problem: On some of the high traffic pages, due to volume of activity, it is difficult to identify true authors or find other editing patterns.
  • Who would benefit: Admins and editors investigating page histories.
  • Proposed solution: Add ability to filter/sort page histories, by for example:
    • Show/hide IP edits
    • Show/hide reverted edits and their reverts
    • Show/hide banned user edits
    • Show/hide bot edits
    • Show/hide minor edits
    • Show/hide edits by number of bytes added/subtracted
    • Show/hide my edits – definitely a necessity
    • Show/hide selected user's edits (if this is deemed uncontroversial)
    • Show/hide deleted edits (for administrators only?)
  • More comments:

Discussion[edit]

  • Nice idea.
    • I had similar plans in background, since that wish came up once in a year in German Wikipedia.
    • There was no broad cry for such a feature.
    • I already mantain w:en:User:PerfektesChaos/js/listPageOptions modifying watchlists and “recent changes”, and I might extend that to history pages with similar options a watchlist already offers. Or mw:User:PerfektesChaos/js/resultListSort which is sorting about 30 special pages.
    • What is a “banned user edit”?
    • “reverts” are edits as any other; they bear no special mark and only full rollback uses a project dependant summary. Simple reverts offer editable summary.
    • IP / registered user, user him/herself edit, bot edit, minor edit, number of bytes less greater than, no summary, personal list of suspicious/interesting users (will need to be stored outside public pages for privacy reasons) – those may be subject to be shown or hidden; or, more likely, to be sorted, showing interesting things in one block together.
    • If this wish is not picked up, I ponder if and how I might implement this.
Greetings --PerfektesChaos (talk) 11:00, 16 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Added some possible filter options. --Vachovec1 (talk) 22:43, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ad PerfectedChaos comments:

  • Reverts: what? "Normal" revert (clicking on "undid" in diff interface) has editable summary, sure, but if not completely overwritten, the summary every times begins with words like "Undid revision (number) by (user)" (for English) or similar predefined sequence for other languages. But you probably can't indentify reverts made with "save this old version of page" method.
  • Banned user: I can imagine A) currently blocked user or B) user marked with template en:Template:Banned user (or with something similar).

--Vachovec1 (talk) 22:43, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Introducing the edit filters already used elsewhere seems like a logical step UX-wise (although not sure how well the database would cope for large articles without major changes to our infrastructure). For reverts, see also T152434. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There is also c:MediaWiki:Gadget-rightsfilter.js. Helder 23:38, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • The essential tool I always needed and didn't realise it was missing untill this poll. Would really save a lot of time. Very useful for COIN, SPI, and research into other persistent disruption. Up till now I have to copy an entire page history into a regex propgram and do it from there (and I'm not a regex or a Quarry expert like much of Wikipedia expects every normal user and admin to be. Kudpung (talk) 20:51, 6 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • The efficient way to identify reverts is by using the digest. Anyway, the history should be collapsed when a revert is detected. It should also be collapsed for consecutive edits. Note also that "to identify true authors" is extremely difficult. What is a true editor. — Jeblad 01:09, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]