Help:Page history
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Reading a page history
First and foremost, the page history tells you who has worked on the page, and allows you to examine the successive versions of the article and the differences between them. You can also see the date and time of each edit, and compare versions of edits to each other. Finally, you can see the comments that contributors have left in the edit summary field about their edits.
Each line in the page history represents a single edit. Every time a wiki page is modified and saved, a new version of that page is saved, and a new line is added to the page history. The most recent version is displayed at the top of the history, so reading down is reading back into any page's history.
Every line in a page history has several elements. Reading across:
- First are two links, curr and last, along with two radio buttons. Clicking curr for a particular version compares it to the most current version of the article (so you can see how that version compares to the version that's currently displayed on the site), while clicking last compares it to the immediately preceding version (so you can see exactly what was changed with that particular edit). The radio buttons allow you to compare any two versions of an article; to do so, select the radio buttons for each of the versions that you are interested in and then click the "compare selected versions" button at the top of the history. This will display the differences in the wikitext (the source code) between the two versions you are viewing, as described below.
- Next, the date and time of the edit are displayed as a blue link. (By default, this time is set to display in the UTC timezone; you can change the time to your local timezone if you are logged-in by going to "my preferences", as described in Chapter 11.) Clicking on this link will show you that particular old version of the page. When you're viewing an old version, a warning message will display at the top of the page, and the page URL in your browser will display the version number, or unique ID, of the version that you are looking at. You can use this URL to link to this particular revision of the page; this is also how the "permanent link" on the left-hand sidebar works.
- Next, the author of the edit is displayed. Clicking on the username will bring you to the editor's userpage, if they have one; if the username displays as a redlink, they were logged in but have not yet created a userpage. Note: On Wikipedia IP addresses may also display when a user is not logged in, but IP editing is not allowed on the UCD Libraries staff wiki.
- After the editor's name, there are links to the editor's User Talk page and, if they are logged in, their contributions (contribs) in parenthesis. Whether an editor was logged in or not, you can go to their talk page to leave the editor a message. Again, a redlink means that there are no messages yet on their talk page. Clicking on the contributions link will bring you to a list of all the edits that particular editor has ever made.
- Next, some edits will display a small m if the edit was marked as minor by the editor; minor edits are generally small changes, such as spelling or typo corrections.
- Finally, any text that follows is part of the edit summary provided by the editor. This is (one hopes) an informative comment that is intended to describe what the edit did and why it was made. Sometimes these summaries will be created by automatically and will contain a variety of links.
