Edit Categories

EditCategories are an attempt to increase the relevance of RecentChanges for a wider audience.

Changes to text can often be categorized by the function being performed, such as CopyEditing, PageTranslation, or WikiSpam removal. While new content is assumed universally interesting, other categories are only of interest to a limited number of people, and should be easily filtered out of RecentChanges.

Editors flag EditCategories by adding them to the summary:

[CopyEdit: Corrected grammar]

Often, an update will include several types of change; each can be included and described separately:

[CopyEdit: Corrected grammar] [WikiSpam: Reverted to r17]

While categories as described are non-overlapping, the system can also be used for filtering out content that is objectively irrelevant for known portions of the audience, such as changes made in a foreign language. To enhance this usage, several EditCategories can be combined to narrow the audience for a change down further:

[fr,CopyEdit: Grammaire améliorée] [WikiSpam: Spam enlevé]

EditCategories are a generalization of CategorizedEdit. They supersede MinorEdits, and have a similar vulnerability to abuse. If DigestedSummary is used, inappropriate categorization can and should be corrected by PeerReview.

Implementations

Activity

ChrisPurcell is working on honing this over at Meatball. Current focus is the markup used: [CopyEdit] Corrected grammar was tried originally, but in combination with DigestedSummary this often leads to miscategorization, mostly by newbies who hide their change after a category tag, but occasionally by regulars who fail to spot a preceding tag amidst a long summary.

Current recommended practice is above; again, the Meatball community are seeing how well it works in practice.

Problems

See Also

MeatBall:EditCategories CategorizedEdit

Contributors

ChrisPurcell

CategoryFeature CategoryRecentChanges