I'd like to think about how we can clarify the Flow recent changes text.

Right now, the following Flow actions all appear the same:

1. Creating a new topic
2. Initial post to that topic
3. Another post to that topic.
4. An modification to an existing post.
5. Reply to an existing post

In wikitext, 1 is usually easy to distinguish, since people mostly use the "New section" link on talk, which creates a summary like:

(→<topic title>?: new section)

where <topic title> is user-provided.

3/4 can be distinguished from 1 with wikitext (1 and 2 are combined with wikitext normally), since 3/4 do *not* have "new section".

To distinguish 3 vs. 4 vs. 5 with wikitext (when writing the post), people sometimes use simple edit summaries (though other times, they don't bother to add a custom summary).

E.g.:

(→<topic/section title>: reply

where this is a section edit, and "reply" is user-provided

There is no software support for distinguishing 3 vs. 4 vs. 5. with wikitext.

Flow can distinguish all of these actions (which is a *BIG* win over wikitext), but I believe it does not allow custom edit summaries for any of them. That means you don't have the option of adding a custom summary of "reply" or "reply to Dan"; probably such custom summaries are not needed if Flow provides robust auto-summaries.

But currently, it also does not include automatic summaries or text identifying the action. So e.g. the following shows examples of 1, 2, 4, and 3 (in that order. (From https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?namespace=2600&tagfilter=&title=Special%3ARecentChanges):

We're talking about potentially merging 1 and 2 in the various feeds. So I propose (extending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Automatic_edit_summaries):

(diff | hist) Test post on Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page; 21:09 . . (+9)‎ . . Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk | contribs) (←Created new topic with "Truncated body of initial post...")

(diff | hist) Test post on Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page; 21:09 . . (+8)‎ . . Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk | contribs) (←Edited a post)

(diff | hist) Test post on Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page; 21:23 . . (+22)‎ . . Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk | contribs) (←Added a new post to the topic)

Whether to include content (i.e. "Truncated body of initial post...") is something to consider.

There could also be:

(diff | hist) Test post on Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page; 21:23 . . (+22)‎ . . Mattflaschen (WMF) (talk | contribs) (←Replied)

It could potentially say who you replied to.

There are other actions (e.g. editing board header, summarizing, etc. which I haven't tested, but should also clarify what happened).

Matt Flaschen

_______________________________________________
EE mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

Reply via email to