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Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Custom edit summaries per user

< Community Wishlist Survey 2023 | Editing

Custom edit summaries per user

  • Problem: Reuse of high quality edit summaries is difficult because there is no way to select them again at a later date or to use them across devices. In some cases, the browser shows recent edit summaries but older edit summaries tend to disappear after a while so they have to be written again.
  • Proposed solution: If there was a way to configure, say, a few dozen edit summaries that one commonly uses, it's possible to reuse them whenever a similar edit is made in the future. The edit summaries would belong to the user's account so this allows the software to show them on other devices and improve the quality of edit summaries when making edits on mobile. In user preferences, a text field could be provided and each line could be interpreted as an edit summary. It'd be a place to define these user edit summaries and these are then made available in the editor when filling the edit summary. This could be done next to the dropdowns which are availabe when ticking the "Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box with some useful default summaries" box under Preferences > Editing.
  • Who would benefit: Anyone who wants to provide a detailed edit summary. The benefit of this feature is that you'd only need to write a long detailed edit summary once (possibly with links to relevant policies) and it'd be easy to reuse.
  • More comments: In en.wiki, there is now an option to tick "Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box with some useful default summaries" box under Preferences > Editing, which is helpful for common use. This particular proposal is to extend that functionality with user-specific edit summaries. Examples of edit summaries include: "new stub, passes <some policy>, point 3" or "changed formatting of number, see <some policy>". This proposal has been adapted from Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Editing/Custom edit summaries per user
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Simeon (talk) 18:27, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • This has been adapted from a 2022 proposal (2022 Community Wishlist Survey); I have created it again for the Community Wishlist Survey 2023 as I believe it should be part of the software, easily available for technical and non-technical users (as opposed to user scripts). Simeon (talk) 18:32, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • The 2017 wikitext editor gives you a drop-down menu with previously-used edit summaries, if it helps. -BRAINULATOR9 (TALK) 19:23, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This is generic feature of the visual editor, so it is available in both visual and wikitext modes (aka visual editor and 2017 wikitext editor). ESanders (WMF) (talk) 12:27, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    That drop-down for years have no function to edit its contents - make one mistake typing some edit summary wrong and you will be stuck with in in dropdown forever, because its contents is stored on the server side and user have no control over its contents. What's worse, the mistyped values will often displace good ones out of the limited pool of suggestions that dropdown shows, rendering the whole thing useless, making the user retype nearly the whole edit summary every time before a correct suggestion appears in the dropdown. So no, drop-down is not a solution, not in its current dysfunctional form. I will vote for the present proposal as at least it will allow me to never use that dropdown again and stop retyping edit summaries every time Nyq (talk) 07:46, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Assuming it's accurate for me to understand this wish as wanting to make it easier for people publishing edits to accompany them with edit summaries that other volunteers and their future selves find useful, I wonder if it's worth considering T54174 as a potential solution in this context. T54174 describes a future where the edit summary input is more feature-rich and could support things like: auto-complete for other peoples' usernames, linking to specific pages, links to diffs, etc. Stussll (talk) 00:29, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you have autofill enabled on your browser, that shouldn't be an issue. It's not for me since I have it enabled. That's something you should considered turning on. Mr. C.C.Hey yo!I didn't do it! 10:17, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    But if you're talking about mobile devices (ie: phones and tablets), that's another issue. Mr. C.C.Hey yo!I didn't do it! 16:12, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Autofill is terrible. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gives you things that are completely irrelevant. Al12si (talk) 03:32, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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