Significant Recent Changes
Significant Recent ChangesSignificantRecentChanges is the correct spelling for SignficantRecentChanges (created in October 2000).
Would anyone else be interested in helping to maintain and/or read a "significant" RecentChanges page?
For the past few weeks (before October 9, 2000) RecentChanges has had a large number of edits that I would call MinorEdits. Some of these edits are simply adding categories, removing signatures, and small editorial changes. Other edits add only a small amount of content to a page, like adding one more link to a large list. These edits are good, and totally within the spirit of wiki, but some people would rather not read them.
For extreme RecentChangesJunkies like myself, this isn't a big problem--it's easy to click through the QuickChanges diff. Not everyone has as much time for wiki as I do, and if one looks at a 3-day list of RecentChanges it can be quite daunting to find the good content. The ChangeSummary experiment of October 1999 was one attempt to find a solution, but writing the summaries took too much effort. (The summary features in UseModWiki are another experiment to see if contributed summaries are useful.)
Rather than attempting to change (tame?) RecentChanges, I'm proposing a new "significant" or "substantial" RecentChanges page. The new page would be manually edited, and would contain a list of pages with "significant" changes. Any editor is free to define what "significant" means to them, but I would recommend a lower bound of two new sentences. (Or a question for the community.) People who feel a change is particularly significant could write a short summary after the change.
For instance, my list of "significant" changes for today (October 9, 10:00am Eastern) might look like:
October 9, 2000 [as of 10:00 am EST]
Does this idea sound useful? Unlike the failed ChangeSummary, it would only list a subset of pages, and summaries would be optional and minimal. --CliffordAdams (who obviously hasn't learned his wiki lessons...)
Try putting your own PagesIRefactored on the page named after you?
Well, maybe a next step would be code (not necessarily running at c2.com) that can be used to "moderate" Wiki pages along the lines of SlashDot. Moderators could choose from: -2 Just too tacky -1 About movies, not programming 0 Whatever +1 Provides a chuckle... +2 About a movie I like so all programmers would like it too! +3 Explains why Wiki should/should not stay as it is right now +4 Mentions XP +5 WardCunningham explains XP
How about this simple change: Make "I'm just doing minor edit. Please divert the usual logging to RecentEdits instead." the *default*.?
That would be great! I often forget to check "minor edits" when I quickly want to change a typo or some such, I don't think I would forget it the other way round.
Surely that just means the RecentChangesJunkies will instead need to keep a closer eye on RecentEdits? What you might want is a radio button with default unset. This would solve the problem in an annoying way.
How about this simple change: put the diff size (e.g. -5+15 lines, or something from "diffstat") on the changes list. It doesn't tell of edit quality, or even significance, but a junkie may learn some useful correlations which save them some time.
(That was done by MediaWiki 1.9, 2007.)
Is the typo in title intentional? --FedericoLeva
I don't know. It is in OrphanNonHomePages and must have been created in October 2000, so no-one seems to have noticed or they could have corrected it over the years. The fact that it is misspelt will also mean it would not show up in a search for significant. When I created the correct spelling SignificantRecentChanges I found that it already had some links, including on RelevantChangesDiscussion, last edited in 2006, where the misspelling is actually mentioned. As a result of my changes it is no longer an orphan page and the whole subject is better integrated. It could be migrated to the page with the correct spelling. -- JohnFletcher
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