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A generalization of MinorEdit. In addition to MinorEdit, there are conceivably a few other categories that might prove useful (useful meaning the reader my wish to filter some of them out of RecentChanges, or at least not read them if they see them, or skim though them).
If this were done, it would make sense to have CategorizedEdit flexible a la FileReplacement (have a wiki page with a list of all EditCategories). May as well let an edit be placed into multiple categories at once (so that, say, a RefactoringEdit might also be a TrivialEdit if the editor thinks it’s especially unimportant).
We’d have to guard against letting it become too much of an annoyance. I propose a rule of thumb: CommunityExpectations for proper scoring of edits should be constructed so as to never require no more than one mouse click onto edit categorization controls. That prevents the worst-case number of clicks required from becoming greater than it is when all you have is MinorEdit. So, for example, if someone makes a trivial refactoring edit, they shouldn’t be required to mark both the TrivialEdit? and the RefactoringEdit boxes (although they can if they are feeling especially altruistic). (by the way, I would say in this case, the TrivialEdit? would be the one they should click).
Any system along these lines makes wiki more complex, though. Hmmm.
Here are some category ideas that I think may be useful:
For those times when you feel your edit is more than a MinorEdit but just doesn’t need to call everyone’s attention by its presence on RecentChanges. This has happened to me but I can’t remember the examples right now; I’ll add some next time I notice it, though. (if this were done, maybe this would end up being called MinorEdit and what is now called MinorEdit would be PunctuationEdit).
(EditHint: move this to MinorEdit/PunctuationEdit/TrivialEdit ?)
I’ve seen some people get upset when someone makes “large” changes to a page, but “sneakily” marks it as a MinorEdit ( CommunityWiki:2004-08-07 ). I wonder if there’s some way to automatically (zero-click) detect minor punctuation and spelling changes ? Perhaps if only a single word was changed … or a category tag or two was appended to the end of the page … (Inserting or deleting a “not”; changing “always” to “never”, are not minor changes). CategoryAntiSpam. – DavidCary 2004-08-14
When you have not added any content, but have refactored. Perhaps many would disagree with any easy way for people to filter RefactoringEdits out of their RecentChanges, though. One other benefit would be this: it is slightly annoying when looking through a diff of a page to not know whether you are looking for new content or looking at a RefactoringEdit. Often when looking at a RefactoringEdit I get the drift of the refactoring almost immediately, but then I go and read every word just to make sure i didn’t miss any new content
when you are not adding a new thread of discussion but just replying to an old one. personally, I would never filter this out of RecentChanges, but it would guide which pages I actually looked at. for example, if I know that the current thread of discussion on a page is one that doesn’t interest me, I would skip over a ReplyEdit on that page. But, if I was interesed, I would probably be particularly drawn to read ReplyEdits over other form of edits.
Many edits that I’ve seen add an item to a list of something or other. most of the time I would have liked to skip over these (I am usually interested in the topic being listed but not so interested that I follow the ListEdit? at the time its posted; maybe some other time I’ll go through the list one by one. as I am not usually an expert on what is being listed, there is no change that I will edit the edit anyhow, so there’s really no point at me looking at those edits on most pages. But I do anyhow, wondering if the new addition is a list item or new content of some other form).
Indicates a post which is not discussion about content, but meta-discussion. For example, “I diagree”, or “doesn’t this belong on this other page?”, or, “You’re violating UseRealNames, mister”, etc.
Michael Fagan proposed an interesting classification scheme for edits.
There are 2 dimensions along which each edit can be classified in this system.
He also stressed that we can’t make it too annoying for the user.
CategoryUnimplementedWikiFeature CategoryRatingSystem CategoryRecentChanges