Template talk:Recent changes in Medicine

In another wikiproject

Here, CFCF asked if this could be work for wikiproject WP:ANATOMY too.

Re: Thisd interest is a good sign, shows usefulness! It would need a copy of this box, with some different new pagenames (for the Anatomy lists). May be set up later on, I'd like to have this one stable first. One other problem: we need a bot apppointment to update these lists once a week (to catch the new project pages). -DePiep (talk) 04:17, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The outcome: {{Recent changes in Anatomy}}. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:12, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And more via Category:Recent changes boxes. -DePiep (talk) 06:36, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why split over five lists?

Recent changes in WP:Medicine

Articles and their talkpages:

Not mainspace:

WikiProject Medicine/Lists of pages/Articles

Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
99	1,069	11,550	38,915	20,637	1,273	73,543

List overview · Lists updated: 2015-07-15 · This box:

As it is today, the box has all WPMED pages split over five pages. We can not patrol them in one click. Why is that?

In short, that is because the 31,000 MED pages (plus their talkpages) receive over 1000 edits per day. If you'd follow these with a 500-lines patrol screen, you'd need to check it twice a day to see all. Splitting the patrol list creates overviews that cover one day or more of edits, within a 500-line list. This setup may be changed though. You are invited to give ideas, below. -DePiep (talk) 03:05, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Background. There are practical effects and limits involved, you as a user experience. Let me show the situation with all WPMED pages. The approach here is by importance groups.

Pages within WPMED
	Importance	number of article pages	number of talk pages	pages, total	edits/24h estimated	rollover time estimated, when showing 500 edits (see below)	Note
A	Top	85	85	170	-	-	See High
B	High	925	925	1850	360	33 h	Top + High together (2020 pages)
C	Mid	8513	8513	17,026	400	30 h
D	Low	15,713	15,713	31,426	310	40 h
E	NA	5889	5889	11778	22	21 days
F	???	31	31	62	20	22 days
G	all MED, no talks	31,144	0	31,144	800	15 h
H	all MED, talks only	0	31,144	31,144	180	2.5 days
Z	all MED, all talk	31,144	31,144	62,288	980	12 h
Footnotes: Numbers of pages as of 29 November 2013. Lists may have a little different number of pages, from the time of updating. The difference is in changes (new WPMED pages; moves to a different group). Grouping could also be done by quality classes, `Start ... FA`. This would yield the same questions, then spread about 20 lists instead of five. The box uses list pages, that actually list all these MED articles+talks to follow. These pages work very fast for the patrol click, but they are very slow to open (to read). A small example: with only a few "???" MED-pages plus talks listed, a list page looks like this: ???-importance pages. Size of the list page may be a problem too. For now, we'll skip that technical issue.

Rollover time: The period of all edits you can see in one patrol screen. A rollover time of "21 h" means that you will not see edits done 22 hours ago.

The period you actually see depends on your personal preferences settings (YMMV). E.g., when you choose to have only 100 edits shown (not 500), your patrol list will show a shorter period.

It also depends on the time of day you look. Let's assuming that many most edits are made in US day/evening time. Clicking in New York 21:00 pm local time may show the lot of 500 edits from 11:00 am that day (rollover time is 21:00 minus 11:00 = 10 hrs). Clicking next morning in NY 08:00 am will show eh "17" edits added that night, the rollover period being from 11:15 yesterday (rollover time now is 20:45 hrs).

Best thing is to compare figures relative, all taken at one moment from one user-situation.

Rollover time is a very important measure, because it says which edits you will not see, which is contradicting the "patrol" idea. -DePiep (talk) 11:11, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rollover times estimation

I have added the numbers for "edits per 24h" and "rollover time" as I measured them today (17:09, 29 November 2013 (UTC)). They are estimations. For this, my preferences → Recent changes were set:

Number of edits to show (...): 500

yes Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist

no Hide minor edits in recent changes

Choices made in the current setup

I choose to add all paired talkpages to the lists. That way, you can see any talk-activity together with the article activity. It appears that only one in six MED edits is on a talkpage (that is, of every 100 edits in MED, 17 are made on a talkpage).

I choose to separate "???" (unknown-importance) from others, because it is more of a project-maintenance page, not content ("new pages, to be assessed"). However, since they get little edits, this list could easily be merged with say the NA-pages.

Now, why the split

I aimed at patrol lists that cover 24 hours or more. Putting all MED in one patrol page (example Z), the rollover time is about 12 hours, making you miss many edits, even if you click once a day every day. Leaving out the talkpages (example G) gives us three more hours (from 12 to 15), still not long enough: you'd have to click twice a day to be complete. -DePiep (talk) 17:09, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ideas? -DePiep (talk) 17:17, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible to add

In all medical articles

to the list? If it only brings up the most recent 500, that's not a problem for me - I refresh the list at least once every 12 hours.

Ah. I see you've added "all MED, no talks" to the above. That works fine for me.

Forgive me if you've already answered this but, is there no chance we can get just the most recent change to each page rather than every edit? Or, is it possible to go earlier than the last 500 changes? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 05:16, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"all MED, no talks" was added here for my research. It is the old "Articles" list you used earlier. Since you say this is the useful one, I'll add it to the standard box. That would be including NA's and no talkpages, as you indicate. Expect rollover time being 12-14 hours.
"Last edit only" shown, possible? Not in these overviews AFAIK. However, you can fold all edits for a page into one line (with a button next to it to unfold).

Step 1: open your personal Preferences page, subpage "Recent changes": Preferences → Recent changes

Step 2: below is the checkbox, about to Group changes; Check it (to yes):

yes Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist

Step 3: Save preferences

Step 4: Check by clicking in the box here

You should see: multiple edits to one page are folded. They have an arrow on the left, that unfolds the list. I thinkk each edit counts as "one" for the "500" list.

Next question: further back in time in this patrol list? not AFAIK. But you can make the list longer. Say from 500 to 700 or 1000 (max) edits. It may become slow loading.

Step 1: open your personal Preferences page, subpage "Recent changes": Preferences → Recent changes

See input box Number of edits to show in recent changes, ...

Step 2: There may be "500" or so - change it to "1000" (=1000 edits shown per patrol page)

Step 3: Save the setting

Step 4: Check. Good indicator is a the earliest edit in the list (bottom one). For your full MED list (all Articles, option G in box here), it should be about 22-26h old.

Note: these are very useful settings for editors like us, so don't give up early -- better ask me more. -DePiep (talk) 07:50, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

More on user settings and usage

Moved here from my talkpage [1]. Of wider interest. -DePiep (talk) 14:59, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, DePiep. That's an awesome tool. Would you consider changing its name from "Related changes" to "Recent changes"? I think people will understand it better with the latter name. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:50, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I understand. My reluctance: "recent changes" is an existing, different menu option (positioned #10 in our wiki lefthand menu bar - so omnipresent and with a different effect). For its meaning & understanding I guess it be better to change though. Part of future development (like: add taskforce options). Next top issue: automated update of the lists, once/week or so.

While you are here: could you adjust your preference settings to better usage? Did you think about "leave out bot edits" and "leave out minor edits" and "leave out my own edits"? (I did not research/describe yet). And: why do you think Talkpages less relevant for your patrol? To me, it seems the first place to look for issues. -DePiep (talk) 08:07, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Leave out bot edits and own edits may be a useful option. (Though, seeing my own edits is a good reminder for me of where I got to on my last patrol.) I would never leave out minor edits because too many stealthy vandals tick the "minor edit" option. You may be right about talk pages. They weren't included in the last tool, and I haven't given it much thought. I might not include them, though, if I had the option just because there is so much to check in article space. But I agree, it would be a useful option for some.

As for the "automated update of the lists, once/week or so", if you're referring to how frequently we add new articles to patrol (new articles with {{WPMED}} on their talk page), I would prefer that we update at latest once daily. This is so that new articles with dubious content that have evaded good scrutiny for WP:MEDRS and WP:NPOV will get noticed sooner by medical editors who are patrolling changes (but who may not be patrolling new articles). --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 11:50, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for discussing this. I found this useful. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:32, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Quick notes: whether talkpages in or out a list must be decided before. This is not a user option (nor afterwards). We do can differ between pages, as we do already in the box.

Todo: these user preference options (list like length) to be into the documentation.

User experiences & usage notes here appreciated. We want to make the box very useful (and then promote it in other projects).

First topics: + make box per MED:taskforce. + Make it updated by a bot (once stable) -DePiep (talk) 15:20, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]