Request: a diff view for wiki revisions — setting out what I have, and where I think it stops being reliable.
I would like to know what people here actually do about diff view for wiki revisions, as distinct from what is usually recommended. Those have diverged in every other subject I have looked at closely.
Mine is below, with the reasoning, including the parts I am not confident about.
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.
The general answer and the answer for your case may diverge here.
This follows post #3 rather than contradicting it.
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.
Adding this to the thread rather than to the wiki, because I am not confident enough for the wiki.
I read post #3 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Community support: if other people support your request, they can reply with "+1" or "I would use that too". Widely-requested features are prioritised.
The rule of thumb is fine; the edge cases are where it earns its keep.
Use case: explain why you think the feature would help. "I would use this to..." makes the request concrete.
That is the version I would defend. It is not the version I started with.
Post #8 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.
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.
I am aware this is the third time this month I have made this point.
Useful. I had the fact and not the reason, which turns out to be the important half.
What I want from this diff view for wiki revisions thread is the list of things that would need to be true for the claim to hold. If we can write that list, we can check it.
Post #12 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
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.
Adding a small correction to the diff view for wiki revisions summary above rather than a disagreement with it. The substance holds; one of the figures is out by a factor that matters.
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.
That is a description of practice, not a recommendation of it.
Small methodological point on diff view for wiki revisions: repeating a measurement is cheap and resolves most of what is being argued about here at no cost to anyone.
Noted, and I have changed what I was going to do on the strength of it.
Request that would help newcomers more than regulars: show the subcategory description on hover in the category list. The names are terse and the descriptions are good.
That is the practical version. The rigorous version is longer and says the same thing.
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.
Happy to be corrected if someone holds better data than mine.
Building on post #22 rather than restating it.
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.
Tradeoffs: every feature has a cost in maintenance and complexity. Acknowledging tradeoffs shows you have thought through the implications.
Adding it in case it saves somebody the afternoon it cost me.
Where I part company with post #24, and it is a narrow parting.
Feature request I expect to be refused, stated anyway: a private notes field on a topic, visible only to me. I keep those in a text file and the text file loses the link.
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.
I would not lead a decision with this, but I would not ignore it either.
Adding the measurement that post #27 says would settle it.
Adding the boring version of diff view for wiki revisions, because the interesting version keeps getting posted and the boring one is usually right.
Check the ordinary explanations, in order, and stop when one of them accounts for what you are seeing. Most of the time the second one does.