User talk:Wget

Feel free to leave here your comments on my contributions or anything else you want to talk about: I'll reply ASAP as I receive edit notifications via mail ;-)

Restructuring talk pages

Hi, I understand that sometimes discussion pages need to be reorganized to follow their evolution, but please avoid doing it in single edits, like [1], since their diffs are very hard to understand; you should use several little edits, as also is recommended in Help:Style#Edit summary :) -- Kynikos (talk) 11:29, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

@Kynikos. Thanks for the hint. I haven't read this help styling page yet. I'll do it now. Don't hesitate to correct me in my future contribution attempts: I'm pretty new on this wiki, as an Archer. ;-)

Eheh you invited me to correct you again, so here I am :) I like your recent edits to Fstab and Persistent block device naming, but it's taken me too long to understand in particular [2] and [3], because you did too many changes at once, resulting, as you can see, in particularly convoluted diffs. Since you are a long-term contributor whose work I've learnt to appreciate through time, I think it's worth to ask you to try and improve this aspect in the future and make the effort to always split complicated changes into multiple simple edits, to make it easier for everybody to understand their diffs, also possibly using the edit summaries more efficiently, linking to other articles related to the change when applicable. Regardless, I'd like to thank you for your contributions once again ^^ -- Kynikos (talk) 05:11, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

No problem ;-) Actually, I often make my changes offline, resulting in committing all my changes in a burst. Redividing the commit after all the text is well written is quite hard unfortunately. But sometimes, like I did for the aforementioned fstab and Persistent block device naming articles, I made my changes directly on the wiki. I could have had divided my commits, but I didn't for a simply reason. When I was working on the Virtualbox article (and I'm actually still on it, devs are quite hard to reach and official doc is far from being complete), I saw that committing some small changes, resulting sometimes in an inconsistent article state, was counterproductive. As the next change was taking some more time to be completed (a few hours), contributors watching the page believed I had stopped working on it and corrected/reorganized the article in the meantime. This drove me crazy and I asked you how to put a warning message at the top of the article i.e. "The article is being reworked. Please do not modify, post on discussion.", something like that. Since then, and on Wikipedia as well, small changes are split into different one, big reorganization and rewrite, I wasn't. But I'll try to take your advice into consideration ;-). -- wget (talk) 17:17, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

I understand you don't want to leave the article in an "unstable" state: what I do in those cases is save the various revisions into local text files with their summaries at the top, so that when I'm ready I can submit them one by one in rapid succession while keeping each diff as simple as possible. Another simpler way that improves the diffs if you've made big changes to the source of an article, is to save the new source section by section instead of all at once: this usually helps the diff engine to better understand what has changed, and not report false added/moved/removed lines. -- Kynikos (talk) 05:14, 20 July 2014 (UTC)