Issue: A user-friendly version of Special:Recentchanges page

It is not possible to simply show a preview of updated text, since a three-way text differential needs to be performed. For lists this would use too many resources. Additionally, it is not guaranteed that only one segment is changed.

So, the best we can do in this case:
1. Instead of pointing links to the updated version, point them directly to a comparison page versus the previous revision (except for first revisions).
2. Update comparison pages so that un-updated segments are collapsed by default if they are more than 1 line long (use ...)

If more than one segment is changed, can we just have more than one link to the relevant section headings?

The main thing is that when users ask the question, 'What has been updated in the Wiki?' they get an immediate answer to their question: "article1#section2 and article1#section4 and article2#section1 have been updated". Links going direct to the relevant bit of article in question would be more user-friendly than links to a comparison page, but the comparison page would definitely be better with all the unedited text collapsed.

When the user performs a section edit, Recent Changes is supposed to already track that, show the name of the edited section, and provide a link to only that section if that's what you wanted to read.

But what it sounds like you are asking for is a solution for when the user doesn't explicitly say "I want to edit Section2" + click the appropriate edit link, but instead they use the main Edit tab at the top. You would like VaultWiki to try to figure out what sections were changed.

Theoretically this is possible, but consider this example: a wiki page with 25 long paragraphs that are not broken up by headline tags. As one perfectly valid edit, someone changes a few words in paragraph #2, adds a sentence to paragraph #18, and removes a few lines from paragraph #22. VaultWiki tries to figure out what section was changed, and wastes a lot of resources to determine that there are no sections to begin with. We could feasibly say "a change was made to line 2, 18, and 22", but we would not be able to provide useful links because no bookmarks were created by headline tags. Simply showing a preview of the new line is also not that great - you probably don't know what it was before, so how it might be an improvement would be lost on you.

Even though some changes can be easily detected by automation (like changing the title, or making the article longer), for every case, the best solution is for the users who make the edits to actually tell you what they changed and why they changed it.

It seems like you are encountering the problem where these users are not leaving explanations of their edits in the "Reason for editing" field. If a user does put something here, that too is already included on the Recent Changes display. There is an option to force users to enter a reason whenever they edit a wiki page (see: https://www.vaultwiki.org/pages/vaul...-Wiki-Articles). It's a setting in the Namespace Manager, and it applies to all wiki pages that fall under the forums in that part of the wiki.

Hm? No... we have our wires crossed.

Yes, that's exactly what I want to have happen.

I have a user clicking 'section 2' in the TOC, clicking 'edit' for that section, entering their 'reason for editing'. Then user b wants to see what's been edited in the wiki since her last visit and goes to 'Recent Changes'. She sees links to the article title - to the whole article - and to 'curr', 'hist' and 'diff', rows of them. But no link to 'section 2'.

I can see that in a long article with no headlines - no h tags - you couldn't provide a link to the specific text edited and it would be daft to try. But when text under one heading has been edited, it would be great to have a link just to that heading. If editing-user had edited sections 1 and 2, then there could be two links, one to each heading.

ETA: here is a screenshot of an entry on the current 'recent changes' page:

The user can see that hilary has added 822 characters to the article, but to find what they are she'll need to click 'hist', then on the next page select the 'cur' and 'last' radio buttons and click 'compare revisions', and then on the next page scroll down a long page to spot the subtle pale green bar that marks the addition.

Instead, it would be great if the grey text, 'Name Articulatin' - by the little blue arrow that links to that version of the whole article - were a live link to the section edited.

Okay, so here it is: in that screenshot, the "cur" link should link directly to the same 'compare revisions' page you want to see. It says 'cur' when it's the most recent edit, and changes to 'diff' if it's an older one. It's unclickable and says 'last' if it's the only one. If it doesn't do that, it was a bug that we fixed in version 4.

I suppose these terms could be improved. I'm considering replacing the short-words completely with an Options drop-down ('Compare to previous', 'View History'). The little arrow is a broken link in the current version of VaultWiki 4, so I can't see yet if the section-jump is fixed already for old revisions.

A quicker route there, thanks. But once I'm there it's still the whole article, with the requirement to scroll through looking for the green highlights.

I like the idea of the dropdown menu rather than the 'cur' and 'diff' and 'hist' links - I find them a bit mysterious, as you can probably tell .

Fixed in Beta 2. There is now an Options drop-down with more verbose links (Compare to Previous, View Complete History) and the broken links are fixed. Section links appear to work properly for both current and older revisions.

History, Recent Changes, and Contributions are getting a makeover in 4.0.0 RC 1. You can check them out on our site now to see how they've changed.