Checking your diffs
From DPCanadaWiki
Many DPC volunteers check their diffs to see what changes have been made in later rounds. This can be a good way to learn what you're doing correctly and what you may need to change in your proofreading or formatting habits.
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When are diffs available?
Your pages must have been proofed (or formatted) in the next round in order for you to see what changes were made. For some short, popular projects it may only take a few days, but more often it takes weeks or even months. Because of this, it's generally impossible to know how long it will be before you can see the diffs.
Note: due to the potential delay in seeing your diffs, if you want feedback more quickly you should post in the Project Discussion or send a Private Message to dpc-feedback.
How to access your diffs
Finding the project page
To look at your diffs for a particular project, you need to go to the Project Page. There are two ways to do this:
- At the top of a DPC page (such as the Activity Hub or the P1 page), click on My Projects. Find the project that you want, and click on the title.
- If you know which round the project is currently in, go to the page for that round (via the Activity Hub). Find the project, and click on the title.
Accessing the page details
View the Page Details for the project, by clicking on one of these links on the Project Page:
- Images, Pages Proofread, & Differences: shows details for all the pages in the project
- Just my pages: shows only your DONE and IN PROGRESS pages in the project (useful for projects with lots of pages)
- Detail Level 4 (link at the top and bottom of the Project Page): shows the project's Page Details below the Project Comments on the Project Page
Using the page details
On the Page Details page, there is a table with information for each page. The columns, from left to right, are:
- Number (usually the same as the .png number)
- Upload information
- Image: a .png file number, linking to the image
- OCR text (the number is the file size in bytes)
- Page State: this can end with page_avail (available), page_saved (saved as done), page_out (checked out, not saved), page_temp (saved as in progress), or page_bad (marked bad)
- P1 information
- P1 differences: diff (link to the changes made in P1), or no diff if no changes were made
- Date: date and time when the text for that page was last updated
- User: name of the volunteer (only visible if you've worked on that page); after the name, in parentheses, is the number of pages proofed by that volunteer in P1
- Text: P1 text (the number is the file size in bytes)
- Edit: a link to edit the page, if the project is still in P1
- the same information as in (4), repeated for each round that the project has gone through
All pages that you have worked on will be highlighted. If a DONE page is available for re-editing it will have a green background; IN PROGRESS pages have an orange background. A red background indicates that you worked on the page in a previous round, and can no longer edit it.
Looking at the diffs
For any page that has a "diff" link, clicking on it will show you the text before and after that round, with changes highlighted. For instance:
This example is from a P1/P3 diff (the project did not go through P2), so the text on the left is from P1 and the text on the right is that of P3. The proofers' names have been deleted, but are normally shown in parentheses after the round name. Only the lines that are highlighted in yellow and green had changes; the lines with a white background are only shown to give the context. "Line 1" indicates where on the page this text appears. The first change made by P3 was adding a note; that note appears in red on the right because it was not there in P1. The next change is much farther down on the page, near line 92. The change is only the addition of a space, which can't be shown in red, but you can see the difference by comparing the two texts. The final difference is "a" changing to "u"; in both versions the whole word is shown in red.
The "Previous," "Next," and "Jump to" options near the top allow you to look at another diff page from the same project without having to go back to the page details first.
Problems with the diffs
Problems with semicolons
As reported in task:443 on DP-INT, when there is a change on a line that includes a semicolon near an ampersand (&), a quote mark, or an <angle bracket>, this may cause an error on the diffs page, displaying text such as: <;i>, </i>;, and ;&;. This bug does not affect the saved text; it is only a problem in the diffs display.
Lines are highlighted, but no change is apparent
Changes made to fix "spacey quotes" types of errors may be tough to spot, so examine the spacing around quotation marks carefully for any differences. In addition, the diffs pages do not show any spaces at the beginning of a line, and multiple spaces in the middle of a line are shown as just a single space. If a change is made to the spacing anywhere in the line it will be highlighted on the diffs page, but the before and after texts may appear to be identical. Except for the corrections of "spacey quotes," the closing up of "extra" spaces in a given line is optional when proofing.
Changes to blank lines at the end of the page do not result in the page showing as a diff on the page listing but do show up in the diff tool.
Lots of text is red
Occasionally if many changes are made to a page, the diffs program may get confused and incorrectly show a large amount of the text in red. This will also happen if some text is moved from one place to another: it will be red in both places, even if nothing was actually changed within the block of text. In these cases you just have to compare the old and new texts yourself to see if any changes were made.
Getting help understanding diffs
On the Page Details page, each volunteer's name is a link to send them a Private Message. If you see a diff that makes you wonder, "Why did they do that?", feel free to send them a PM inquiring why they made the change.
If you prefer not to contact the person who made the change, you can send a private message to a Project Facilitator instead, or ask in the forums. There are two different "Explain that Diff!" threads, for proofreading diffs and for formatting diffs.
