I think I already posted this on Wiki Tech Wish List, but I think a little discussion would be good.

As it currently stands, the page history pages only show the exact line that was altered. The problem is that if the altered line is one of those indented second or third-level conversations, you only see the altered line itself, not what it was responding to. Let me describe what I mean.

A Page

• Response Layer 1.
  • Response Layer 2
    • Response Layer 3.

If only the third layer is altered, all we see is...

Changed Line X from

• Old Response Layer 3.

to

• New Response Layer 3.

But what if reading the first two layers is necessary to understand what's going on with layer 3?

Is it possible to tweak the display window to show everything from the single bullet point before the change to the single bullet point after? Thus we can see changes in context?

Changed Line X from

• Response Layer 1.
  • Response Layer 2
    • Old Response Layer 3.

to

• Response Layer 1.
  • Response Layer 2
    • New Response Layer 3.

Does everybody understand what I'm talking about here?

Understanding is had by this troper.

This would be very nice, especially for WMG pages and the like.

Support this.

It would also be really nice if there was some highlighting of the added/lost/changed part of the text; sometimes the change is tiny and it would be great to see that straightaway.

Would it even be possible, searching for the single bullet before and after a change?

Ideally, I'd like to see a few lines on either side of the change displayed, which I can't imagine would be too much trouble to adjust if the revisions are stored as full pages and not just text diffs. If they're stored as text diffs... Well, what you see is all you're going to get for current histories - the most that could (reasonably) be done would just improve on the situation for future edits.

How about a recreation of the entire page, with phrases that have been added, removed, or changed in different colors? Like, phrases in red have been removed, phrases in green have been added, phrases in blue have been altered and replaced by the green phrase after it, etc.

Related to that, could you make it so it numbers the lines on view source or something like that? It's very difficult to tell if someone's deletion of line 117 was appropriate if you don't know where line 117 was. (It's even harder to put it back, also.)

A recreation of the entire page would be a huge resource drain, especially for minor edits on long pages. If all that's been changed is that a "Appearence" has been corrected to "Appearance" at line 67, do we really need to see all 512 lines?

Are histories stored as relative diffs or as entire page versions? If the latter, then it wouldn't be much of a server resource hit at all.

Clarification: Minor diffs like Madrugada mentions will still be hard to locate, but there's also the flip side of needing to know in context where a minor change is made, which would be easier with full source.

edited 3rd Aug '09 3:15:53 PM by Anemotaxis

Where did I say recreate the entire page? I just want to recreate everything leading up to the layer that was changed. A dozen lines, tops.

Right here:

Sorry, that was an alternate theory that I'd forgotten about.

Though again, it can't be much of a server drain at all to number the lines in View Source or something.

So Yeah. Bumping and all that. This really is a perpetual annoyance. I don't like having to open the original page in another tab and searching to learn about changes in context.