The caveat is the whole objection, I think. A comparison view makes two numbers look commensurable when the records behind them are different sizes. This is where my knowledge stops and I would rather mark the edge than blur it.
Posting this under the heading it deserves: Request: a diff view for wiki revisions — the long version Everything below is what sits behind that.
A narrow question about diff view for wiki revisions, deliberately narrow, because the broad version has been asked here four times and produced four long threads and no answer.
One question, stated units, stated method, and what I have already ruled out.
Asking for something deliberately narrow: a way to link to a range of posts rather than a single one. Half the good exchanges here are four posts long and there is no way to point at all four.
Request with the use case rather than the feature. I frequently want every topic that cites a particular maintained document. At the moment I can find the document from the topic and not the reverse.
Worth checking against a second source before it gets quoted onward.
An observation about diff view for wiki revisions that I cannot explain and am posting anyway, on the principle that unexplained observations are more useful public than private.
Post #4 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Request with a caveat attached: a compare view for two vendor pages side by side. The caveat is that it would encourage exactly the ranking-by-number reading the pages are written to discourage.
I would want a second opinion before relying on that.
I read post #2 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Request: an export of my own posts. Not for any dramatic reason — I want to search my own history offline, and site search is optimised for finding other people's material.
Two sentences on diff view for wiki revisions and then I will stop, because the rest is speculation and the thread is better without mine.
What is documented is narrow. What is inferred from it is broad. The gap between them is where every argument here lives.
Use case: explain why you think the feature would help. "I would use this to..." makes the request concrete.
Someone will know this better than I do and I hope they say so.
The caveat is the whole objection, I think. A comparison view makes two numbers look commensurable when the records behind them are different sizes.
This is where my knowledge stops and I would rather mark the edge than blur it.
Fair, and the limits you put on it are the part I will remember.
I had written a reply contradicting post #9 and deleted it. Here is what survived.
Fair. Then under the name, at a smaller size, permanently.
Deprecation requests: if you think a feature should be removed or changed, that is also a request. Explain why you think it would improve the site.
Small request: let me filter Latest by whether I have read the topic. Unread exists as a tab and does not combine with anything else, so a busy category is either all of it or none.
I am describing what is, rather than arguing for what should be.
Coming back to post #13, because the follow-up matters more than the original answer.
Speaking only to diff view for wiki revisions as I have actually seen it, rather than as it is usually described: the effect is real, it is smaller than the thread suggests, and the variance between people is larger than the effect.
Post #17 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
The useful distinction on diff view for wiki revisions is between what was measured and what was inferred from it. Both end up in the same sentence and only one of them has error bars.
This is the first time the answer has come with its own limits attached. Appreciated.
Picking up post #18: that is the part I would want checked first.
Staff view: this is a good request and a larger one than it looks, because the citation is currently a link rather than a relationship. Recording it properly is the work, displaying it is trivial.
On post #20 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Practical note on diff view for wiki revisions: write down what you expect before you look. The number of times I have found what I went looking for is higher than chance would allow.
Request from the analytics side: allow a table in a post to be marked as data rather than layout, so it can be copied without the formatting. Half the tables here are worth pasting into a spreadsheet.
The short answer was in the first line; everything after is the working.
I keep a log for diff view for wiki revisions specifically because my memory of it turned out to be systematically wrong in one direction. Six weeks of notes cost nothing and settled it.
Post #26 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Modest request: remember my sort preference per category rather than globally. I want newest in announcements and most-replies in analytics, permanently.
I keep a log of this specifically because memory is unreliable about it.
Adding a data point of agreement rather than a data point.
That reframing is better than the original request and staff would consider it. Which is a good illustration of why these belong in public: the first version would have been declined and the third is worth building.