Add Check-in Comment

HI It would be nice if one can submit a comment to a page when finished editing (like in CVS). This comment should be send with the Webnotification. Because sometimes I only do some 'cosmetic' to a page and sometimes I change the content. If I 'only' change some 'cosmetic' and someone gets a notification about this he/she can see that it may be not so important to look for the changes.

-- ThomasSchroeder - 01 Nov 2001

A potential problem I can see is that if the change is anything other than "cosmetic, don't bother checking it out" or a major essay, the comments' contents will be pretty much the same thing as was entered in the text itself.

See BrainstormScratchPad#Skip_Changes_Notification_for_ma wherein Mike Mannix listed a whole bunch of related discussion.

-- MattWilkie - 01 Nov 2001

MeatBall:MeatballWiki is a Wiki that does this, and it works pretty well - they have a one line only comment that shows up in MeatBall:RecentChanges (in the square brackets). Where people use it, it's very useful to have this. However, it's a bit like meaningful subject lines in email - not everyone understands why they are useful.

-- RichardDonkin - 13 Jan 2002

I would also like to see this and I think it should be permanently stored with the revision so that we can have a history page for a topic that lists all the revisions with the comments beside them. see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&action=history for an example.

How hard it would be to add an extra parameter to the top META tag in topics? I'm wondering if there is much code that assumes the current parameters and would break if another was added or if it just stores them as a hash.

While we're doing this it would also be good if we could have a parameter for minor changes as requested in SkipMinorChanges. This would also bring us in line with many other wiki's, if you look at the wikipedia page linked above the minor edits are marked with a bold m.

-- SamHasler - 29 Jul 2004

This is a very good idea, and long overdue.

A box on the edit screen could provide a value for a parameter to save, save_comment. This is really quite trivial to implement, thought it requires care to catch all the affected places in the core code.

Further discussion on change notifications moved to ImproveChangeReporting

-- CrawfordCurrie - 01 Oct 2004

I'm just bumping this up to update the form information (it had the old ChangeProposalForm). Useful if someone wants to pick this up.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 12 Aug 2008

I am changing this to ParkedProposal until we find an owner.

-- PeterThoeny - 2009-11-24