Talk:Timestamp position modification/Flow

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Talk:Timestamp position modification/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

So is anything coming out of this?

The e3 team ran a series of experiments around it. The research is available here. I don't know about plans for productization, though.

The mobile team is working on a last modified feature that will appear on all articles on .m Wikimedia sites – should be deployed next week to Beta :)

The short answer is that it definitely seems to be of use to readers and editors, but because our goal is to focus on things that directly aid editing, we're not making it permanent right now.

Thanks for the answers. Stay tuned, I guess.

That's such a shame that it's not going to be followed up with... It's a really good, simple idea, it's been shown to be useful to editors and readers, the design and research work has been done, and it's not going to affect anything else (AFAICT). Can you put a call out to the volunteer community to run with it rather than simply shelving the whole thing?

For others passing by: this was answered at m:Research talk:Timestamp position modification.

LastContrib gadget on the French Wikipedia

I created a gadget years ago (in 2007) which places the last modified date in the small gray line under the title, having in mind, as editor, to avoid edit conflicts. It was useful when I triaged new pages, quickly seeing if some poorly formatted new page is still being edited one or two hours after its creation, so I defined 3 levels of alert: if the last modification was before 100 seconds, 8 minutes, 40 minutes (see image on the right).

It needs further research, but I think you can add points in the research it is useful also for editors for the above reason. It also append that, when I see on some random page this one was recently edited, I check if it wasn’t a vandalism and sometimes it is, so an other argument for readers and editors is: the more recent the last modification is the higher the probability of vandalism on that page is (a sort of soft "Flagged Revisions"), and even one can imagine asking the reader/editor to verify the last modification is correct and giving some alert if it is a vandalism.

Currently the timestamp conflicts with the FA star and other top icons, see: bugzilla:37255 and https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesaurus. If we can't get the div to not overlap, alternative options for placement include...

• under the title line, in the upper right. This conflicts with the geocoordinates common in articles, so it's a no-go.
• under the title line directly, replacing the largely redundant text "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". This option is good, except that it conflicts with a gadget used by ~13,000 people on English Wikipedia.

It may be possible to exclude editors with that gadget enabled, as a workaround for the test. We are going to try that if we fail to correct the overlap with the templates.

For the record: the bug is marked as "fixed" now.

I've had the following code in my personal /monobook.js subpage for ages:

#lastmod { position:absolute; z-index:40; left:155px; float:left; top:2px; }

It moves the "This page was last modified on 10 October 2011, at 21:31" to the top of the window, above the "article / talk / move ..." tabs. It's incredibly helpful, though occasionally it overlaps with the user links ("MZMcBride / my talk / my preferences ...") if my screen is too narrow or too zoomed in.

It should be noted that the timestamp isn't always up-to-date. In rare cases, the HTML cache of the page won't be updated for whatever reason, so the date displayed will simply be wrong. It also doesn't update when templates, images, categories, or links change state, as far as I remember. I don't remember if actions such as page moves or page protections will trigger an update. I'm hesitant to see it put next to the <h1>, but having it more prominent would definitely be good, I think.

I finally fixed up my "last modified' move code (among other modifications to my UI) and I just uploaded a screenshot here: commons:File:Stripped MediaWiki interface.png. I think in addition to putting the timestamp above the tabs, it'd also be nice to re-evaluate the other "personal tools" links (language, necessity, etc.).

In general, this idea seems pretty easy to implement. Is there any holdup to doing this as a gadget or something now? The only other consideration was whether a more sane output format could be specified in the HTML output rather than trying to parse the lastmod MediaWiki message/timestamp formatting. Maybe a wgVariable has the timestamp of the most recent action to the page? Or one could be added? That'd be so much cleaner for date calculation.

I think the only holdup is features devs being busy with work on stuff like New Page Triage (being previewed this week) and the usual stuff like code review. I agree it's something that should be tested sooner rather than later, and it's totally possible for myself, Maryana, and a data analyst to help push it forward as part of our experiments work even though we haven't hired our first devs.

If this is something you could help us code up, let's talk. If not, then we can at least list out of the order of operations a little better, since testing it for current editors, new editors, or readers each might require a different approach to implementation.

I just checked and word on the street is that there should be the start of an extension living somewhere. I'm unclear whether it was migrated to git yet or not, but supposedly it's called "LastModified" or some similar variation.