Tracking Wiki Changes

Keeping track of things that are changes on a Wiki.

The RecentChanges page is the key place to find out about pages which have changed recently. (The Front Page on this site does the same thing.)

But what about depicting what has changed within a changed page?

Some alternatives

Zwiki, like many other WikiEngine-s, lets you include an optional "note" or "summary" as part of a change. In Zwiki this (form field) is called 'log'. This is stored in a property called last_log, which gets set by method setLastLog. (Adding last_log to ZopeCatalog metadata.)

• the problem with this method is that even if you try to be "good" about including a note, I find that I often make many changes within half an hour as I tweak the text of a page. Being afraid of losing that data, each gets saved. It's hard to keep including a note at each step.

  • idea: save a cookie with a half-hour life for the last note value? Then pre-populate the form field? That would be bad if you were editing multiple pages!

  • another idea: just go back at the end of a "batch" of changes to a page and make a null change with a note attached. Who will be compulsive enough to do that?

    • also: it doesn't work - the note doesn't get recognized unless there's a change to the actual body. Change the code?

Zwiki lets you Append a comment to the bottom of a page. Each Comment can include a Subject - the form field is called 'subject_heading'. This isn't stored anywhere, but just goes into formatting the chunk of text appended to the end of the page body.

• by the time you get to the 'append' method, 'subject' has already been created by adding 'subject_heading' with user and dateTime info. OK to include all that in the call to setLastLog? hmm I must be on drugs because on my test setup only the 'subject_heading' shows up in the view.

Zwiki, being based on Zope, tracks change history for each object. Theoretically you can do a diff between versions.

• I've never found those to be useful, esp if trying to stick with limited space.

• and if you're making lots of changes, each of those becomes a separate generation, so just showing the latest change wouldn't be very useful

  • theoretically you could pick a generation from, say, the previous day, to use as your comparison against the current version. That would be messier to manage, esp in real-time.

last_log notes --DeanGoodmanson, 2003/07/22 22:26 GMT
I would like ::

If you editing (not commenting) AND your the last editor AND # last editor username == current username The change was made within the last 24 hours: the previous last_log is the default value for the Note entry box

This covers editing tweeks, the cause for 90% of my last_log overwrites.

now showing edit last_log on Front Page --BillSeitz, 2003/07/22 22:53 GMT
but what about during Append, like this?