What is the rationale for this change?

Wiki.Melancholie wrote:

(In reply to comment #1)

What is the rationale for this change?

To be able to comment, why you sighted/reviewed or [actually more important] why you un-sighted/un-reviewed a revision.
Or for just tagging revisions for special purposes.

For me it's the question why the comment box is shown when JavaScript is disabled, but hidden when JavaScript is enabled.
Why hiding it?

If you should mean those 300px: Just a number that will fit into one line (if 1024x768) even when texts are a bit longer than the short English original ones. That's just a proposal [no must]; the actual topic is "do not hide #mw-commentbox by JavaScript".

Done in r44041

pbirken wrote:

I strongly disagree with this bug. It is a bug that the box in shown when not using Javascript, not that it is not shown when not using Javascript.

The comment box for sighted version serves no purpose at all, since the comments are not visible except after deliberately looking in the log. So now, people will think that they have to comment when sighting, slowing things down. Please revert this ASAP.

Wiki.Melancholie wrote:

Why to restrict functionality?
It seems that you even want to remove/hide this great possibility at all.

Every wiki is different, but a tool has to provide features; not being hidden/unknown by default.
With #wpReason {width: 300px;} (see above), the input field would have been in one line with the button(s), not annoying at all.

If you want to hide the comment box, so that your users at dewiki do not see it and *cannot use it at all*, please do it individually:
[[de:MediaWiki:Common.css]]:

#mw-commentbox {display:none}

pbirken wrote:

Useless functionality is the opposite of userfriendlyness and currently, comments on sighted versions are simply just that: useless since they cannot be seen in a reasonable way. Now, if you want comments activated on your wiki, that's fine, but that doesn't mean that the default configuration should be changed.

This can be hidden locally.

It is useful if someone wants to re-rate a revision by changing a tag value (wikis may have several) or give some explanation to alleviate "review wars".

Wiki.Melancholie wrote:

@P. Birken: A good software doesn't hide its features; it offers them (smoothly). Nobody looks into the HTML source to find gimmicks that are hidden by CSS classes (in this case it even had been JS/CSS). Nobody will know of that else; and on the other hand hiding/disabling something locally is easy.

People have to comment why they are unsighting a revision. Furthermore "sighting" is the lowest level FaggedRevs offers, and thus perfect for article/revision tagging for external/special purpose use. You maybe do not use article tagging on dewiki, but like on enwiki and others articles/revisions are tagged for some purposes. The problem is that currently you have to edit (change) an article there for being able to give a summary. Furthermore you have to filter for 'trusted users'. With FlaggedRevs this gets smoother and more inherent.

OK, now someone could ask: Where can I see those 'tags'? Regrettably there is no free space on history pages for that, but 'tags' are meant for scripts/bots (to produce a DVD/CD etc.), so its enough when it's just in the linked log (although it's missing in XML dumps yet, but see bug 16546 for that).

On dewikt we are even considering to comment a sighting if someone else shall please look into an undetermined exotic translation afterwards for example (only for basic correctness (shouldn't state "f***" ;-), for detailed correctness there will be the 'reviewed versions' of course, but that's another story), because no single person speaks *all* languages. Wiktionaries e.g. are much more complex than Wikipedias. FlaggedRevs could have the potential to make cooperation/coordination much easier there.

m.l wrote:

Hiding #mw-commentbox locally hides the comment box if you want to depreciate a sighted version, too. Is there a possibility to hid the comment box if you want to sight a revision and show it if you want to depreciate it? If not: Please add a configuration parameter for that purpose, and activate it for dewiki. Maybe this also could be done by adding a new CSS-class, but i am not sure. Thanks in advance!

More information on this topic (German):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilfe_Diskussion:Gesichtete_und_gepr%C3%BCfte_Versionen#Entsichten...

Requests for more classes need to go in a different bug.

At any rate, I fear there is much todo about nothing with this comment box. Even with it there, it doesn't add any line breaks to the form, and is fairly small.

Anyways, the issue here is that whether you are reviewing or un-reviewing depends on how the form is set, not how it started, so using a CSS class would require some JS. This seems to go back to the issue why the thing was unhidden, unfortunately.