Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Search history contents

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Search history contents

NoN Proposes existing feature

  • Problem: Searching for a particular diff is time consuming
  • Who would benefit: Admins dealing with for example possible vandalism and anyone investigating for example orphaned images
  • Proposed solution: It should be possible for confirmed users to search for a text string in the contents of an article history (and no reason not to enable it for other pages such as project and talk as well). This should allow searching in either the content as presented or in the source. It's obviously a processor and storage access intensive task so should be low priority or background, but would still save the searcher time.
  • More comments: I am often looking to see when a particular change took place, either as an admin or as a contributor. For example I recently wanted to know when a subsequently orphaned image had been removed from en:Luo Bao Bei in order to see what edit summary had been given, and who had done it so as to discuss this with them. Similarly, when I stumble upon what seems to be undetected rubbish that has been added to an article... sometimes vandalism, sometimes good faith... the first thing I want to know is when it was added and by whom. I simply want to find the diff that did the damage! But sometimes this can be years and hundreds of edits in the past. Manually searching the page history is time consuming.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Andrewa (talk) 16:57, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Hi Andrewa! There are several existing solutions for this. For your first example it sounds your trying to find when someone removed something from a page. For that, you could use WikiBlame tool, checking the "Look for removal of text" option. Your second example (where you want to see who added certain content that is still visible), was a top 10 wish in the 2017 survey. Community Tech has already built a visual tool that I think you would assist you. See Who Wrote That? for documentation. It is available as a browser extension. If that doesn't work for you, you can still use the WikiBlame or XTools Blame. Finally, there is a built-in feature called RevisionSlider that makes it much easier to identify where content was changed. To use it, open up any diff (example) and click on the "Browse history interactively" dropdown at the top. As a first-time user, you should be prompted for a tutorial, if that helps.

    Do any of these solutions work for you? MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

    • Thank you! I'm sure they will all prove useful. But I would not call any of them solutions. They are workarounds.
    • I am installing the RevisionSlider extension. Here is how far I got so far. I downloaded the compressed file, which was in a .gz format I'd never heard of and which my system did not recognise. I installed 7z to extract this file, which extracted to a .TAR format which I had heard of but which my system doesn't recognise either. 7z is supposed to support this format but I am still trying to extract the files. Now I used to be a geek but am long retired and out of my depth here obviously. I will get there I'm sure.
    • But do we really expect everyone wanting the feature I'm looking for to go to this much trouble? Wikipedia has a systematic bias towards people with a technical background. This sort of "solution" is one of the reasons.
    • WikiBlame appears to run on a third party website. OK, we have many such tools and I already use some of them. But we should not depend on them any more than we need to.
    • I'll have a look at WhoWroteThat. It again requires me to install something, is that right? If so I will have no access to it from the library computers I have used in the past and on which some of our contributors depend.
    • But all good suggestions, and thank you again. Andrewa (talk) 15:35, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • Trying to help: I think Andrewa is misunderstanding. The RevisionSlider extension is an extension for the MediaWiki server software. You are not running a MediaWiki server. You want to use the extension in the English (or German or whatever you use) Wikipedia. The server administrators have to have installed the extension. The English Wikipedia has it. To test it, open a diff, such as the one provided by MusikAnimal and look for the "Browse history interactively" dropdown at the top. I don't know if it does what you want. --Error (talk) 13:22, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        • Thank you, that's very helpful! You are of course correct. I'm feeling quite stupid not to have realised that it was a MediaWiki extension not a browser extension. But you say it's installed on en:Wikpedia? I don't see it. Why would that be? Something to do with my personal settings? Andrewa (talk) 19:42, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
          If you do not see a button "Browse history visually" on this page then it might be that you have disabled either the feature in your Preferences in the section Appearance is an option "Don't show the revision slider". Perhaps you have checked that at some point. Alternatively it is always possible that you have disabled all Javascript in your browser, which would be another reason for it not to be present there. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:27, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Since there are several solutions to this, I'm going to archive this proposal. Do give Who Wrote That a try; I think you'll like it! Thanks for participating in the survey, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 04:29, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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