Help:Tracking changes

From The Muniment Room, a resource for social history, family history, and local history.

MediaWiki offers a collection of special pages and tools to keep track of what is going on in the wiki. So you can watch for example:

• recent changes to all pages
• the revision history: all changes made to one page
• the contributions of one specific user
• newly created pages

The most interesting special page is Special:Recentchanges. It displays all edits, file uploads, page moves, deletions and other actions done in the wiki. In the menu on top it offers a collection of links to customize your display: limit the number of changes shown, the number of days or restrict it to edits to a certain namespace. You can also hide edits marked as minor (don't forget that major changes can be flagged by a user as minor anyway).

One line in recent changes consists of several links:

• “diff” displays the difference to the previous revision of the page,
• “hist” links to the revision history of the page,
• the link with the full title of the page brings you to the current version. If the title is in bold, it indicates that it is on your watchlist.

Next is a flag describing the article modification type:

• “N” denotes a new page,
• “m” a minor edit,
• “b” an edit made by a bot.

Following the timestamp, it shows the page size difference to the previous revision, then the user is mentioned, with a link to their user page and their talk page and contributions, or to their talk page only in the case of anonymous users.

Last but not least, there is an edit summary, appearing in italics, if the user submitted one when they made the edit.

See also

• Special:Newpages
• Related changes: Special:Recentchangeslinked/Pagename
• User contributions: Special:Contributions/User
• History
• Help:Watchlist