Proposal:Better View History

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!

1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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Proposal

The history of an article is now not easy and fast to overiew. Only the changes on the syntax can be viewed and further the changes are showen via numbered lines. Thats good for experienced users but no good usability at all for unexperienced users.

We should have espacially for unexperienced users a second more usable history. There should be a more visual history that shows the recent changes in a time flow on the existing(!) article (no syntax) and highlights the changed parts.

For instance, we would need to sort its entries by name or added bytes, and a dedicated search engine for all the history versions.

Motivation

It is often said that Wikipedia must be critical of the media but for new or unexperienced users it is really hard to overview a long history of an article. A better usability of the history would also forestall a bit of the critics on the quality in Wikipedia because it would be easier to see the creation of an article.

Potential Costs

Though I am no developer I can't really figure out hte potential costs. So please developers share your thoughts!

I think I already saw once an external tool which dealed with this proposal but can't find it anymore. Please comment.

• AWB and WikiEd both have alternative diffs. Also mw:Visual Diff.

References

2 tools offer a beginning of this project:

• http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=fr&wikifam=.wikibooks.org&page=Fabriquer_du_savon&grouped=on&order=-edit_count&max=100&format=html
• http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl?lang=fr.wikibooks&page=Fabriquer_du_savon

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Better View History.

Want to work on this proposal?

1. .. Sign your name here!
2. Vibhijain 06:09, 14 May 2011 (UTC)