Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Editing/Improve diff viewer - how it handles line breaks

Random proposal ►◄ Editing  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Improve diff viewer - how it handles line breaks

• Problem: I don't know what it is a duplicate of, but https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Storm_causes_building_wall_at_Amazon.com_warehouse_to_collapse&curid=2855173&diff=4444290&oldid=4444286&diffmode=source is not visualizing the change properly. There is no workaround :-(
• Who would benefit: everyone editing or viewing the history
• Proposed solution: make the diff more sane
• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets: phab:T7072 (phab:T208933 is a duplicate of it)
• Proposer: Gryllida 07:22, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

• I would add to the proposal that split/merged paragraphs should be detected correctly as well. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:37, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
• There was some work done on diffs in the past year or two and I'm not sure it ended up in the right spot. --Izno (talk) 20:28, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
  • That was WMDE Technical Wishes/Show text changes when moving text chunks, and as they describe in the page there, the related code is intensely complicated. I think this proposal and the new phab task are probably duplicates of phab:T7072. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:00, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
    • Updated phab tickets section above.. I don't think the proposal is a duplicate, since the ticket you linked is not assigned to anybody, the community tech team can work on it. --Gryllida 00:06, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
      • Don't worry about things being assigned. If CommTech can take it on, we can change who is assigned. :) --Izno (talk) 23:49, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Izno: moving paragraphs is better now (see link shared by Quiddity); however, this proposal is about edits which involve splitting a paragraph. --Gryllida 19:53, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
• It's probably way beyond the scope of this proposal, but it'd be amazing if the diff view gained the ability to expand context above and below the displayed changes, ala GitHub's diff viewer. (This would be especially valuable for Pending Changes review. Turns out, to properly interpret someone else's changes can often require far more context than the existing changes view displays.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 10:51, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

• What I have faced; the diff viewer is excellent in comparing how the source code get changed; but it is not good to find how the change will appear to the reader after the change is executed. So just not only source code comparison; there should be a separate section/preview pane for comparison of changes in the page's look, changes of texts, rows , columns within tables, changes in pictures, etc. The colour hilight indicator should be present for executed page output comparison too. RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 19:18, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Voting

•  Support I can't understand why diff viewer still has many problems after all of these years. 4nn1l2 (talk) 01:03, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 08:02, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support (as suggestor) hopefully this improves collaboration and edit review. :) Gryllida 08:08, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Yeah, this is very hard to understand what actually changed. ‐‐1997kB (talk) 10:07, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Libcub (talk) 10:44, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Atsme^📞📧 15:51, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support —Thanks for the fish! ^{talk•contribs} 20:17, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support if it can be disabled in compare method of API. Iluvatar (talk) 20:42, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support The Diff viewer has been improved in the last years, but is still not very satisfactory. It can't handle split/merged paragraphs, and see also the proposal "Include section name in the diff" Megatherium (talk) 20:49, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Tim Landscheidt (talk) 02:45, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Galobtter (talk) 06:52, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support NMaia (talk) 10:28, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 18:03, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Benjamin (talk) 10:28, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support β₁₆ - (talk) 11:04, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 16:33, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:11, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Gareth (talk) 11:53, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Novak Watchmen (talk) 00:28, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support The diff viewer is not very "visual". It should be more visually comparable. Also there should be preview panes for comparing how the pages look like when the formatting commands are executed. Such as there is a change in a complex table or complex infobox in 2 edits. Then in the difference viewer there should be some indication of how the pages differ to the visitor; not just how the 2 pages differ to the programmer. RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 19:12, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Vulphere 02:27, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support NaBUru38 (talk) 18:27, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:01, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support —  HELLKNOWZ   ▎TALK   ▎enWiki 23:41, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Ranjithsiji (talk) 22:45, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 02:15, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support PJTraill (talk) 23:21, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Yes, the diff view should always show the smallest possible diff, not mark the whole paragraph as red and underneath show the same paragraph with tiny changes all in blue. Dvorapa (talk) 13:33, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Linguistical (talk) 16:12, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support --Nemo 22:39, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support APh (talk) 11:39, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Cymru.lass (talk) 20:31, 29 November 2018 (UTC)