RecentChangesTimelineIcons

On RecentChanges, the page that was changes is displayed, and the time of the most recent change. However, it would be useful to have an icon to let the user know when else that page was changed; has it just been changed this once; has it been changed a lot in the last few days, and then not for awhile? has it been changed frequently and continuously for the past few weeks?

A small icon could convey this information succintly. Imagine a rectangular bar outline. The bar is long horizontally. The inside of the bar is white, but there are black lines inside corresponding to each time the page was changed. The left side of the bar corresponds to the current time, and then as you move to the right, time goes backwards. The rightmost region of the bar might correspond to two weeks ago.

Then RecentChanges can list each page Wiki:OnceAndOnlyOnce, improving the Visual:InformationDensity.

implementation concerns and ideas

Q: Send dozens of unique image files to each person, every time he looks at RecentChanges. Wouldn’t that overload the server ?

A: No.

• Have a WikiClient and have the images stored in the client.
• Make the display very granular. (I.e. 1 bar represents one change in the last 5 days or something) so that you have a very small number of distinct timeline icons (and so after receiving all of them once, the user’s client wouldn’t have to request them anymore). (If the bar shows the last 30 days worth of activity, 5 days of no activity = white bar, 5 days with any activity = some other symbol, we have at most 2^6 = 64 possible images).
• Use plain ASCII chars. For example you define a string of 30 underscores (=30 days), where you consecutively replace one of them with an asterisk to denote page editing activity.
• Use only 2 images. Convert each underscore in the ASCII representation to <img source="passive.png"> , and each asterisk to <img source="active.png"> , and send it to the browser.
• In-line CSS bars look exactly the same as .gif or .png bars. Apply CSS to an ASCII representation like <span class="encolor-me">*___________________*_______***</span> to make pretty colored bars.

contributors

• CommunityWiki:BayleShanks – initial idea
• MarioSalzer – much better implementation
• Visual:DavidCary – minor tweaks.

discussion

People map “time” to “space” in several different ways. Apparently BayleShanks thinks of “distant past” to the right, “recent” to the left. I usually draw timelines in the exact opposite direction – “distant past” to the left, “far future” ( http://futures.wiki.taoriver.net/ ) to the right. – Visual:DavidCary

An arrow drawn over the box, or an arrow head attached to one side of the bar can easily disambiguate the direction of flow of time. Using several shades for the parts of boxes, depending on the amount of edits per corresponding time chunk, or even amount of text changed, can further increase the resolution. – RadomirDopieralski

CategoryFeature CategoryRecentChanges