Using Recent Changes For Comments

Problem:

When doing edits small or great, sometimes we feel the need to explain what we've done. This includes general comments about the new revision, apologies, refactoring notes, etc.

For example, the motivation to DeleteOneLiners might not be clear unless you reference the page. How can we delete the one-liner, and then leave some sort of explanation?

One common solution is to use "[DeleteMe]" lines. Though they aren't the end of the world, they probably couldn't be classified as Signal.

Proposed solution:

What if we jotted these notes on RecentChanges itself?

For example:

• XpAndChgOrConfigMgt? (deleted) . . . . . . UserName

could become:

• XpAndChgOrConfigMgt? (deleted) . . . . . . UserName [Abbreviated name deprecated in favor of XpAndChangeManagement]

(Note: This actually works on this Wiki with no problems. When the next change to the page occurs, the original comment is cleanly wiped away.)

[Potential] Problems with This Solution:

1. Without them, you have to revisit the actual page more often, which gives you more chances to rethink the content.

2. Maybe having to bite our tongues when we want to make these comments is good. For example not being able to apologize might motivate us to avoid doing things that would warrant an apology.

3. This encourages people to edit RecentChanges more, which might have some negative, snowballing effect.

4. You have to remember to hit the "divert the usual logging" checkbox if you don't want the edit to show up on RecentChanges itself.

---

If you think that such comments are good, then they should be supported by the wiki engine. Look into MeatBall or DseWiki to see this in action. In fact user like this feature and use it a lot. I'm not so happy with it. I think that looking at pages again and again, rereading and rethinking them is an important for refining them. Comments are a way around this. -- HelmutLeitner

The particular example of deleting, though, resists that. Editing RecentChanges to explain why a page was deleted could be of great value in preventing the page being created again. As it is, sometimes the page gets recreated because the original person missed the explanation.

In practice editing RecentChanges is difficult. Otherwise this is a great idea. We want people spending what few cycles they have to devote to this on improving pages -- not wading through them trying to figure out what's going on. -- PhilGoodwin