[Crossposted to wikien-l and wikitech-l.]
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:09:22 -0500, Jimmy Wales
<jwales(a)wikia.com>
wrote:
When I met Seth, he explained to me how this
happened. The vandal used
a classic trick... the double edit. The first edit was the vandalism,
the second edit was innocent. So if you checked the diffs incorrectly,
you would not see the attack paragraph.
Hell yes. I see that a lot.
Presumably this is something that could be countered by technical fixes.
Admin rollback already automatically reverts multiple consecutive
edits from the same editor; the manifest usefulness of this feature
would be one more argument for granting rollback privileges to
non-admins. But _seeing_ the sum of the edits should definitely be made
easier: I think that the diff links in the watchlist, at least, should
automatically show all the combined edits made by the last editor.
It'd also be nice if the diff view showed how many edits there are
between the two revisions being compared; besides being, IMO, a good
thing in general, this would help make the change I proposed above less
confusing.
I don't think this should be particularly hard to implement. What I'd
like is comments on whether this would actually be a good idea, and
suggestions on where else, besides the watchlist, it should be applied.
(At the risk of [[WP:BEANS]], I'd like to note that there is another
related problem; if a vandal blanks the section of an article containing
the interlanguage links, a bot will often quickly show up to restore
them, as a side effect hiding the vandalism itself from the watchlist.
Making the bots smarter would help, but I'm not sure what can be done to
solve this problem in general, beyond hiding bot edits from the
watchlist by default and making the feature actually do what it should
do -- i.e. show the last non-bot edit instead.)
--
Ilmari Karonen