Journal getting long: undo, or cleaning up?

[coevolving]

In the transcript of long texts, I find that I'm filling up the journal with incremental edits. Most of the edits are productive, as new content is being added, but a significant portion really aren't productive, due to finger slips so that I exit the edit box before I'm done.

Should I be thinking about (a) an easy way to revert to the prior edit so that I can complete the sentence, or (b) a way of cleaning out the journal so that intermediate edits that really don't make sense don't become clutter?

[coevolving]

One way of pre-empting the filling up of journal with unwanted revisions could be to recognize the difference between major edits and minor edits.

On Wikipedia, after the "Edit Summary", there is a checkbox for "This is a minor edit".

On Drupal, in the "Revision Information", there is a "Create New Revision" checkbox. I normally do use that option when I'm making substantive changes, but not when I'm correcting spelling mistakes.

There may already be a workaround in federated wiki: I could take the browser offline to do all of my edits, and then reconnect the browser when I feel the cumulative edits should go up to the server. However, I don't normally put my browser into offline status, and would then need to think about what that does to the other work I'm doing (since I multitask, and having part of a browser offline doesn't feel right).

So, I'm now seeing the long series of icons in the journal as a symptom, rather than the real problem. The real problem may be tight coupling of the client and the server that conceptually shouldn't be there. It's common for people to write long documents on their workstations (e.g. in Word or LibreOffice) and then upload the content when they feel it's "ready". I have worked in simultaneous edit using Google Docs, but only when I have synchronous alternative communcations (e.g. telephone) with the other person. Federated wiki seems asynchronous to me, rather than synchronous.

[WardCunningham]

I've written up some notes.
http://ward.fed.wiki.org/condensed-journal.html

I notice that I first add condensing to my todo list two summers ago.
http://ward.fed.wiki.org/view/wants-and-needs_rev36

[WardCunningham]

@coevolving, I'd like to correspond by email regarding patterns. I'm at ward@c2.com.