Help:Recent changes
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The Recent Changes page in MediaWiki lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in your MediaWiki project. Using this page, users can monitor and review the work of other users, allowing mistakes to be corrected and vandalism to be eliminated. There is a link to the Recent Changes page at the top of each page (the "history" tab) and in the sidebar of each page ("Related changes"). You can also create a link to the page as [[Special:Recentchanges]].
Understanding Recent Changes
With the default preferences, the bulk of the page consists of fifty lines, one for each edit, looking like this: :)
- (diff) (hist) . . MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing mathematical formulae; 10:06 . . 128.214.14.50 (Talk) (Add examples)
- (diff) (hist) . . N MediaWiki User's Guide; 10:06 . . Brion VIBBER (Talk) (New page)
- (diff) (hist) . . Endnotes moved to Footnotes; 10:05 . . Maveric149 (Talk)
This indicates three edits: the first by a user who is not logged in, to MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing mathematical formulae; the second by Brion VIBBER to MediaWiki User's Guide; and the third by Maveric149 to Endnotes.
From left to right:
- "diff" links to the diff-page for this edit; it is not available for new pages, or for page moves
- The "hist" link corresponds to the Page history link on the edited page: it shows not just this edit but also older and newer ones. For page moves, the hist link leads to the history of the new page title
- A bold m indicates that the user marked the edit "minor". Only logged in users can mark edits minor, to avoid abuse.
- A bold N indicates that the page is "new", i.e., previously did not exist. It is possible for a change to possess both the "minor" and "new" indicators; this is typically used for new redirects.
- A bold ! indicates that the page is unpatrolled. For more information see the Help topic Patrolled Edit.
- The next link is a link to the current version of the page in question.
- 10:06 refers to the time in UTC. You can change the time to your time zone using your preferences - see how to set preferences.
- For logged in users, the next link is a link to their user homepage (as usual with internal links, the view page if the page exists, the edit page if it does not, the two being styled differently). For users who are not logged in, the link is to their User Contributions.
- Finally, there is a link to the user's talk page (the same remarks regarding existence apply).
- For page moves, a link is given to both the old and new title.
Preferences
Logged in users can set preferences to adjust the way that Recent Changes looks. For help in doing this, see how to log in and how to set preferences. The options that affect recent changes are:
- Hide minor edits in recent changes - this hides all edits that have been marked as minor by logged in users;
- Enhanced Recent Changes - with this option enabled, multiple edits are grouped together. This option uses JavaScript, and won't work in every browser (see m:Browser issues with MediaWiki). See Help:Enhanced recent changes
- Number of recent changes. You may select the number of changes which will be shown by default on the Recent Changes page. Once on that page, links are provided for other options. In the case of Enhanced Recent Changes this number of changes includes those that are initially hidden.
Top of Recent Changes page
The content of MediaWiki:Recentchangestext is what appears at the top of Special:Recentchanges. It can be edited when necessary. MediaWiki talk:Recentchangestext is for discussing what might go on it.
Viewing new changes starting from a particular time
If you have loaded the recent changes at, for example, 09:45 Feb 25, 2003, it gives a link "Show new changes starting from 09:45 Feb 25, 2003", giving you the changes you have not seen yet. In order to use this link later, after you have used the browser window for other things, or if you switch off the computer in between, you can instruct your browser to bookmark it (with Internet Explorer: right-click on the link and choose "add to favorites"). Alternatively, you can save the page with recent changes.
To get the new changes without one of these preparations, use (in this case, if the time above is UTC+1):
http://textbook.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20030802064526
(format yyyymmddhhmmss, UTC time).
You can copy this URL to the address bar and change date and time.
The "Number of titles in recent changes" set as preference is applicable.
This feature can not be used in conjunction with "hide logged in users" (see below) unless the URL is modified manually.
Hiding logged in users from recent changes
Special:Recentchanges/hideliu is a version of recent changes that only shows changes by users who have not logged in. This can be useful for those watching out for vandalism. Features such as viewing changes starting from a particular time can be used with the hideliu feature, but only by manually altering the URL to add &hideliu=1 to it. For example, clicking the time (as described in the section above) may take you to the url
- http://textbook.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20030802064526
You would need to change this to read
- http://textbook.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20030802064526&hideliu=1
in order to view the recent changes without logged in users starting from this time.
Restriction on number of edits; alternatives
A maximum of 5000 edits can be obtained, currently on the English Wikipedia covering ca. 3 hours (use "limit=5000").
Checking changes for a longer period are restricted:
- watched pages: (use "My watchlist" in combination with "Revision history"). This runs less smoothly: on the English Wikipedia it often does not work ("database error" or "sorry, we have a problem").
- pages that are linked from a given page (use "Related changes" in combination with "Revision history")
- newly created pages (use "Newly created articles", then view the current version, or, if desired, also the revision history).
- individual pages (use "Revision history") and individual users (use "User contributions" in combination with "Revision history").
- namespace filter in the "Recent changes" (since MediaWiki 1.5) lets users see recent changes for the given namespace.
See also below.
Edit records that are changed or lost
After a page has been renamed (moved), earlier edits, including the original creation of the page, are shown in Recent Changes etc. under the new name.
After a page has been deleted, earlier edits, including the original creation of the page, are not shown in Recent Changes etc.
In this Recent Changes differs from a real log of editing events (the latter in the sense that something that has happened can not be changed afterwards). Compare Historical revisionism.
However, some edit lines are in Recent Changes (as long as it lasts) but no longer in edit histories, watchlists, Related Changes or User Contributions: when moving a page over a redirect, the creation of that redirect is only in Recent Changes (and only if that was recent enough, of course). In particular this applies in the case of re-renaming a page back to its original name, and subsequent renamings back and forth.
Bots
Bots can be hidden from recent changes by adding &hidebots=0 to the url. It is possible for sysops to mark some edits as bot edits, thereby preventing them displaying in the default recent changes. See Help:Reverting for more information on this.
Patrolling edits
Other MediaWiki features showing lines about edits
(see also Help:Edit summary#Places_where_the_edit_summary_appears).
Revision history (also called page history)
Every line represents one edit to the given page and the version resulting from it
- "last" is similar to "diff", explained above
- "cur" gives the difference between this version and the current one (i.e., excluding the edit shown by pressing the "last" next to it), which is the cumulation of all later edits, including those which are not in this revision history because they were made after loading this page
- the date and time link to the version of that day and time, except that in the first line, which is about the latest edit at the time of loading this revision history, the date and time link to the current version, hence with the changes made after this revision history was loaded;
The "cur" and "last" features are similar to those in Enhanced Recent Changes, except for "cur" in the first line: it is not linked in the revision history, while in the Enhanced Recent Changes it gives the differences corresponding to the last edit; just after loading the revision history this is the same as the "cur" link of the second line gives, but if there have been edits after loading it is different.
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Wikipedia-specific help
This page is a copy of the master help page at Meta (for general help information all Wikimedia projects can use), with two Wikipedia-specific templates inserted. To update the main text, edit the master help page for all projects at m:Help:Recent changes. For Wikipedia-specific issues, use Template:Ph:Recent changes (the extra text at the bottom of this page) or Template:Phh:Recent changes for a Wikipedia-specific lead (text appears at the top of this page). You are welcome to copy the exact wikitext from the master page at Meta and paste it into this page at any time. To view this page in other languages see the master page at Meta.
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The Recent changes page or RC list is a special page that lists the newest changes on the wiki. This constantly updated page shows who made what changes and to what page.
Special actions, such as page moves, changes to user rights and such actions that are logged to the log are also displayed on the recent changes page.
How do I use Recent changes?
Recent changes is the best place to see what is going on with your wiki. Seeing what pages your fellow users are editing tells you where their interest is focused at the moment, and where you can help out. Edits to "Talk:" or "Forum:" pages can alert you to discussions you might want to contribute to.
The "diff" link is an easy way to examine the change that an editor made to a page. This can help you see positive changes and collaborate with good users, and it can also help you quickly spot and revert or rollback spam and vandalism. See Help:Diff for more information.
The RC listing also gives you many other tools for working efficiently with others. A good edit might lead you to click the "Talk" link by the users name so you can praise them, or "Contribs" so you can see what else they are working on. Once you've identified a bad edit, you can use "Contribs" to quickly find out if any of the users other edits were unhelpful as well.
How do I interpret what I see on Recent changes?
This is an example of a recent changes list item:
(diff) (hist) . . N Test page; 03:10 . . (+65) . . Jack Phoenix (Talk | contribs ) (test edit)
Let's find out what that means.
Diff and hist links
On the far left side of a list item are two links, (diff) and (hist). Diff takes you to the page diff view, which shows you what was changed from the last version in comparison with the newest version, but the link doesn't work if the page is a new one (like in our example). Hist link takes you to the page history where you can compare old versions of the page.
N, m, b or no letter at all?
The letter N signifies that the page is a new page.
The letter m before the page name (in this example, the page name is test page) means that the editor marked the change as a minor edit, so it's something trivial, such as correcting a typo.
It follows, then, that Nm means means that someone created a new page, but marked it as a minor edit.
The letter b signifies that the page was edited by a bot. This means that the edit would normally be hidden on the Recentchanges list, unless you have chosen to see them by clicking the "Show bot edits" link.
If there's no letter before the page name, that means it was a normal edit. It could have been something like adding a section, sourcing claims or such.
Strange numbers, what do they mean?
The positive/negative numbers after the page name and timestamp show how many characters were added to or removed from the old page, which gives you a quick idea how much the page has changed. This can be very helpful in spotting great new edits, or page-blanking vandalism.
These numbers are usually black, but you can color-code the recent changes list (green for additions, red for removals) by asking an admin to add the following code to MediaWiki:Common.css:
.mw-plusminus-pos { color: #006500; }
.mw-plusminus-neg { color: #8B0000; }
What is that inside the parentheses?
The italic comment inside the parentheses is the edit summary of an edit -- a small comment explaining how someone changed a page. For example, if you cleaned up a messy page, you could leave cleanup as the edit summary. Since edit summaries are made by choice, not all edits in recent changes have edit summaries.
What do the links at the top do?
The first line identifies the current (default) settings.
The second line provides links to allow you to increase the size of the RC page, so that you can see more edits going further back in time. (Items do eventually drop off of Recent changes -- you can't go back forever.)
The third line allows you to hide or show edits marked "minor", "bot", "anon", "logged-in" or your own edits. Each of these is helpful to different kinds of editors, who use Recent changes for different tasks.
The final line shows the time that the RC page was loaded in your browser. By clicking on the date/time link in this line, you can reload Recent changes to show only edits that are newer than that time.
The drop-down box allows you to show only recent changes for a particular namespace, such as Image: or Template:.
The "Toggle enhanced recent changes" link turns off and on the JavaScript-enhanced RC page.
Where can I learn more?
- What is Enhanced Recent Changes?
- How do I let others know I've already checked whether an edit is good?
