History pages are a key tool for article maintenance! Some possible improvements:

• More reliable layout; clearer divide between rows, and/or better wraparound behaviour

• Better separation of data from actions. "Data" includes revision links, timestamp, user info, edit summary, tags, et cetera. Actions include rollback, undo, thank, et cetera.

• Fewer mildly-cryptic things that might be confusing to newbies. For example: "cur" and "prev" links aren't self-explanatory as "diff with current revision" and "diff with previous revision", respectively.

• Visual representations of data. For example, graphical links between net-null revisions (usually between a revert edit and the revision to which it reverted). The key idea here is "information on history pages that doesn't require reading words or numbers", so that it's easier to understand a page's history at a glance.

I've played around with some of this already using JavaScript; interested parties can paste importScript("User:Nihiltres/nothingthree.js"); and then nothingthree.customRevs.testRun(); into the console of an English Wikipedia history page to see how my experiments ended up. For example, I make the byte-difference more self-explanatory by changing "(65,176 bytes) (+1,234)" into "+1,234 → 65,176 bytes".

I stopped messing around a) because it was tiring and b) because this is something that should be implemented in MediaWiki proper, rather than reimplementing the whole damn history page in JavaScript. Maybe something the Community Tech team would like to take a run at?

{{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 20:25, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey

This proposal received 11 support votes, and was ranked #60 out of 107 proposals. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Moderation_and_admin_tools#Better_history_pages