Some of you may have noticed, that in the Approval Nodelet and Status nodelets, theres now a "node history" link. This link makes (more) public a view of how a node has been changed by any janitors tinkering with it. Thus, even if said editor forgot/omitted to attach a note to the node saying what they did, you can check by looking at its history.

The history give a list of all edits by janitors that have been done to the node. Each edit can be viewed in detail, giving diffs between the current state and the state at the time it was edited.

The purpose of this is to make the janitorial work more transparent for the users, also to encourage the janitors to only edit for formatting, retitling and other approved edits.

For janitors who are curious as to what other janitors have been up to recently, there is now also a node containing the most recent 50 edits by any janitor to any node. You'll find it linked under "hysteries" on the editor's nodelet.

Any problems/suggestions for node history stuff, please msg me or reply to this node. Any complaints/suggestions about janitor activities, use the consideration system, or /msg janitors

Enjoy.

C.

PS: janitors, there is now a "make private" checkbox on the node edit page for janitors, ticking this box makes the change invisible for users, and should only be used in extreme cases like removing passwords/email addresses etc.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: (Janitorial) node histories
by cog (Parson) on Mar 21, 2005 at 11:04 UTC
    and other approved edits

    I have a question. Do janitors correct spelling and such?

[reply]
      "And such" ?

      The general consensus is that janitors correct spelling of keywords in node titles, in order for these not to be ignored when searching for them. Otherwise, no, no spelling/grammar etc should be changed by janitors.

      C.

[reply]

      Good question, and one that has been addressed a few times. But it doesn't hurt to reiterate several points.

      Janitors' job is described briefly on the Janitors page:

      Editors "clean up" nodes which have been submitted for consideration (What is consideration?) or Editor Requests. They are often called "janitors" since they mostly fix ugly formatting, remove duplicates, etc. and avoid editing content.

      This group was announced here.

      There is a key phrase there: "avoid editing content". We enveavor to repair formatting that makes a node practically unreadable. We fix problematic node titles so that they're searchable, occasionally we obscure someone's username and password when they accidentally or naively post it as part of a code snippet included in a node, and I'm sure at some point in time a Janitor has probably removed an f-word or somesuch linguistic gem. We have at times obscured links to materials posted in a way that infringes upon a known copyright, we assist in coordinating the consideration and removal of pure duplicate nodes. We unconsider a few nodes, making an annotation that the vote tally favored "keep"ing the node as-is, we act upon sane and affirmatively voted considerations, we send people pointers to nodes that explain how to format posts, and so on. But for the most part, we try to (and hope to) do nothing to the vast majority of nodes.

      We don't touch content to fix spelling errors, grammatical errors, textual ambiguity, linguistic shortcomings, logical fallacies, errant answers, arrogant attitudes, or for any other reason except for the rare cases listed above.

      If you've ever posted a really messy node, and come back later to find that someone has fixed your broken HTML, that was a janitor doing his/her job.


      Dave

[reply]
Re: (Janitorial) node histories
by sweetblood (Prior) on Mar 21, 2005 at 19:02 UTC
    Would it be possible to have the link appear only after at least one edit has been made?

    Sweetblood

[reply]
      Not without an additional database access. Once we have a functional way to tell if a node has been updated from the node record itself, I'd like it to check before showing the link, but not as things are now.
[reply]

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