User:SebastianHelm/wishlist

This page is meant for listing wishes that I have already submitted or plan to submit for improving Wikipedia. It is by no means complete as I'm only adding new ideas as they pop up; there are many older ones in various locations on Wikipedia, and I haven't gotten around digging them up.

Vandalism related wishes
Of course, my first wish is that we had less vandalism, but that goes without saying.

One-click vandal fighting
Vandalism fight: I'm not a dedicated fighter myself; I revert it when I see it, but I don't look for it. I would do more if it were easier technically. Basically, I don't see why editors in good standing can't automatically get a "V" button next to each article in our watchlist that means "Now this was vandalism!" and does all the rest for you, such as writing the user warning. Display: revertions folded would then display the edit previous to that vandalism.

Display: User edits folded
Why in the world do we need to always list every individual edit each single user makes? If a user did several consecutive edits, why not simply fold them into one? There could be a "+" button next to it to it to unfold them, but I would use that button very seldom. Similarly, the "previous" and "next" buttons in the diff view should just skip to the next user's edit. (If people really insist on keeping the microstep view then we could display that whenever applicable.

Because Brian Vibber doesn't want to fix it. See bug 7062].

Display: revertions folded
In addition to "m" for minor edits and "b" for bot edits, add "r" for reversions. Any reversion would just automatically be marked with an "r".

The "fold reversions view" would look very much like the "related changes" list. There you have a little triangle to the left, which you can expand to see all recent changes, and a parenthesis like (2 changes) that shows the overall change. For the "fold reversions" view, of course, the parenthesis would not show the overall change, which would be nothing, but a list of all texts involved in the changes.

I don't even think we need the old view anymore, but there will always be people who prefer the old style, so we probably need to provide a choice in the preferences.

(See also User_talk:Philip_Trueman/Archives/2007)

Trace text
I feel we need a way to easily find out when and by whom a certain passage of text was introduced or deleted.


 * Why necessary?: This is necessary for various editing and vandalism fighting tasks, such as the following: In article A, I see some obvious vandalism (text insertion or deletion). Currently, I look at the last change. In the best case that change is the vandalism in question. However, that is not the vandalism I'm looking for. In that case, I currently go back change by change until I find the vandalism. That is a tedious work which is more appropriate for a computer. An example is this, which took me 5 minutes and should have taken 5 seconds.


 * Submitted: Not yet


 * Possible implementation - simple: A tool could work as follows: The editor could enter the added, changed or deleted text, and the tool would list any changes containing this change in the article's history. If performance is an issue, the tool could limit the search to a date range.


 * Possible implementation - ideally: In addition to the "action=history" view of articles, we could have a view in which all texts are highlighted in a color depending on when that change was performed. Deleted text would be folded into a plus sign and unfold when editor clicks on them. Right-click on or hovering over a change would show when and by whom it was changed.


 * examples:

Other vandalism gripes

 * Cemented vandalism: User talk:8.9.210.11

Deletion request notification

 * Submitted: 21:04, 19 October 2007 (UTC) at WP:BOTREQ
 * Now at: Bot_requests/Archive_14 and Wikipedia_talk:Guide_to_deletion
 * Status: Got stuck in buraucracy; maybe I could pick it up again.

Things that make Wikipedia no fun that could be changed
These are not necessarily feature requests, but some other things that have been bothering me.

Transclude topics
The reason why I don't participate much on ANI, HD, and RD is that these pages are very busy, and if I replied in an issue, I will not be able to see replies because they get drowned by all the other replies on that page. That could be fixed by transcluding individual topics to subpages. I proposed this both on RD and ANI (around 2006), but the idea didn't fly, for the self-fulfilling reason that people who contributed on that page liked the way they were. Maybe, instead of transcluding, the problem could be solved if we had a better way to manage the watchlist, which brings me to the next topic.

Watchlist
My watchlist contains a host of pages, ranging from pages that hardly ever change to high traffic pages. Among the former, these are either talk pages, where I asked a question on the talk page, and I'm waiting for a reply to that question. (Example: Talk:Vespidae), or pages that I'm watching because nobody else does. Among the latter, there are e.g. ANI or user pages of busy users.

Now, my problem is that the watchlist displays too much, unless I put some effort into weeding out pages. This is time I would rather spend for more productive work. And it gets harder the more pages you have on the watchlist.

I'm thinking about solutions along the following lines:
 * Watch talk pages independently from project pages. It makes no sense that I have to keep watching an article for years, just because nobody answered my question on the talk page yet.
 * Combine the functionality of the "edit watchlist" with the "display watchlist" page. That only adds one checkbox per line.
 * Save real estate by getting rid of the wedding cake on the watchlist.
 * Filter/Sort the list by "last time that page was changed". That way, I could keep all those minor discussions in the watchlist while not getting distracted by the ones that change every minute.
 * Filter/sort user pages by "last time user edited the page minus my last edit there". That would allow me to see pages where users replied, and to throw out the pages where users chose not to reply to my question.
 * Filter/sor user pages by "last time user was logged in minus last time user edited the page minus my last edit there". That would allow me to throw out people who just don't reply to any questions.
 * Sort pages by "last time I changed them". (Not sure if it's really needed, but why not.)
 * Automatically add User:SebastianHelm/replyhere to signature, and replace it with User:SebastianHelm/unwatched when I bulk remove them from my watchlist.
 * Together with filtering, "select all" and "unselect all" button.

Major/minor change handling
Current scenario: A does a major change and then a minor change. B set eir watchlist to "display all". C to "display only major changes".

Observed: B sees the minor change only; C sees nothing.

Expected: B should see a summary of all changes. C should see a summary of all major changes.

Archiving
The whole concept of archiving is just absurd. We already have page histories; if these don't provide what people expect, then we should improve that feature, instead of making everybody and their bot edit huge chunks of their talk pages. In addition:
 * Most archives are just numbered; that makes it a huge chore to search for something you wrote a year ago.
 * Archiving destroys all links to talkpages. That's just plain stupid. (This is one reason why I proposed to transclude talk topics.)

Templates

 * Idiosyncratic syntax that often requires e.g. typing things like " {{{{{1|}}}} ".
 * Problems with protection (e.g. see template talk:Sisterlinks).
 * No sandbox mode - see Template_talk:Infobox_Officeholder)
 * No preview for default values.

Redirects

 * Bots that "fix" double redirects, only to make matters worse. See discussion at Wikipedia talk:Double redirects and, for an example []. (There is no recent discussion about that at Wikipedia talk:Redirect, Wikipedia talk:Double redirect, and Wikipedia talk:Multiple Redirects.)
 * Another redirect related issue - Cirrus intortus: It looks like we got that covered, but when you actually click on it, you will find that that cloud type doesn't even appear in the article. Maybe we need a way to make redirects red in cases like this.

Minor
This lists "minor" issues in the sense that I haven't written more than one bullet about them (yet).
 * Differentiate "Warn user when edit summary is empty" by space. That makes no sense for talk space.
 * Searching for boolean combinations of categories. While there exists a hack (Cat), that hack does not include subcategories nor categories that have been included through templates, and is therefore useless.

Simply frustrating
This section contains stuff that I simply find frustrating, and for which I haven't had an idea for how to fix them yet, or which simply can't be fixed. In some cases, the only thing that's frustrating is that I couldn't think of a better way to do it.


 * The botched case sensitivity of article names
 * The incredible stupid workaround for some of the problems of the above of not allowing uppercase titles.
 * The case sensitivity of links to headlines
 * The cobbled together standards for links. ( [http:address _space_ alias] vs internal address pipe alias )
 * User talk:Balloonman/Why I hate Speedy Deleters. Examples: here and here.
 * Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee‎
 * The layout on talk pages, where indent is needed to distinguish individual messages, the signature comes at the end, and there is no good way to display the common case that two people reply to one message, and you rely on that layout because there is no other way to tell in reply to what a certain message was posted.
 * the fact that anyone can easily change everybody's talk page contributions.
 * non-standard table layout. (This is mainly an issue because it prevents new users, or less techincally minded users from contributing. Would not be an issue if WP were WYISIWIG, but I'm not sure if I want to go there. The format itself is actually quite nifty, apart from the silliness that you have to use !! in headers.)
 * The fact that for a long time you had to sign up on each Wikipedia, and I now have to peruse WP:SUL.
 * For granting administrator rights and similar purposes, people here often count mainspace contributions, which is supposed to be a measure for how much an editor contributed constructively - but that neglects the fact that contributing with well researched and resourced facts is far more time intensive than slapping a hundred Disputed boxes smack on top of articles. That contributes to a culture of gung-ho-manship.