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History merge should support timestamps on both ends
Closed, ResolvedPublicFeature

Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):

The Special:MergeHistory interface should allow merging all edits from time T1 to time T2, rather than only from the beginning of time to time T2.

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):

This is kind of a poor man's version of T23312 (but hopefully much easier to implement, and something I may tackle myself whereas building a a new system entirely is not). It would also make it possible to separate recent edits from huge pages without moving the entire early history of the page, and probably a bunch of other things I haven't thought of.

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):

See above. May also help with situations like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive_17#Significant_100+_edits_wiped_out_from_WP:AN (although my views on using XML import to rebase edits instead of revdelling seem to be against consensus right now)

Event Timeline

I took a look at coding this and it seems to be more complicated than I have the motivation to code. So probably not going to work on this myself.

Well, this is still annoying to get right but I guess I have to implement this after a recent vandalbot attack made me really really want to be able to clean up the history of giant pages.

Change #1174135 had a related patch set uploaded (by Pppery; author: Pppery):

[mediawiki/core@master] Make MergeHistory much more flexible about what it can merge

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1174135

@BPirkle Who is responsible for reviewing that patch if it's not the MW-Interfaces-Team?

We can likely review. Feel free to tag me and/or Aaron Schulz (note that I'll be out a couple of weeks for vacation in starting next week).

Moving it to Radar on our board is mostly an indication that we shouldn't include the task in our upcoming sprint planning as something we're coding ourselves. I suppose different teams have different interpretations of similarly named columns, and frankly our interpretation isn't always consistent.

I've only tested it briefly, but I got it to work fine as a screen reader user. I'm coming from the point of view that on Wikipedia history pages, I've always found the two-radio-button thing so weird that I never ever use it ... I manipulate the URL in those cases. But it's been a while since I've really tried ... I don't know if screen reader tech or my brain have finally caught up, but once I conceptually understood what to do and what not to do (made easier by using my own pages), I had no problem selecting the revisions I wanted in testing. This is one time where the date separation on history pages (which is only visible to screen-reader and mobile users; see T298638) comes in handy for me.

Change #1174135 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] Make MergeHistory much more flexible about what it can merge

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1174135

How should we word this for Tech News please? Thank you in advance.

The entry in the release notes (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1174135/23/RELEASE-NOTES-1.45) is a good template for what to say in Tech News. Other than that I think it's best somebody other than me capable of looking at things from a less involved perspective writes the news entry.

I think that wording is good. I added it to the next-next Tech News: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2025/45 so that people have time to wordsmith and then translate it, since it's a somewhat complex item.