Help:Recent changes
From the White Wolf Wiki, the most complete White Wolf reference
The Recent Changes page lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in WWWiki. 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 the page and in the sidebar. You can also create a link to the page as [[Special:Recentchanges]].
For a general guide to the Recent Changes page see the enhanced recent changes.
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[edit] Understanding Recent Changes
(This section is about the classic Recent Changes, which is the default. Logged-in users can use the enhanced Recent Changes).
- (diff) (hist) . . Wraith: The Oblivion; 10:50 . . 68.14.13.23 (Talk)
- (diff) (hist) . . M Shadow Rift; 14:24 . . Captainmike (Talk)
- (diff) (hist) . . N Orpheus; 14:24 . . MinutiaeMan (Talk)
This indicates three edits: the first by a user who is not logged in, to Wraith: The Oblivion; the second by Captainmike to Shadow Rift; and the third by MinutiaeMan to Orpheus.
From left to right:
- In a line showing the most recent edit to an article at the time of creating the Recent Changes list, the diff link shows the changes introduced by this edit, and also any edits that have taken place since the Recent Changes page was loaded. For other lines, it shows the changes in that edit only.
- 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.
- 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 article is "new", i.e., previously did not exist in the WWWiki. It is possible for a change to possess both the "minor" and "new" indicators, this is typically used for new redirects.
- The next link is a link to the current version of the page in question.
- 10:50 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 homepage, and will be in blue if the page exists, red if it does not. For users who are not logged in, the next link is a link to their User Contributions.
- Finally, there is a link to the user's talk page. This will look red if the page doesn't exist, blue if it does.
[edit] 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 - this option groups multiple edits together. It uses JavaScript, and won't work in every browser (see browser notes). See enhanced recent changes
- Number of recent changes - this lets you 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.
[edit] 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. 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://whitewolf.wikicities.com/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20031213084500
(format yyyymmddhhmmss, UTC time).
You can copy the above URL to the address bar and change date and time.
The "Number of titles in recent changes" set as preference is applicable.
[edit] Restriction on number of edits; alternatives
Possibly the largest number of edits can be obtained when you do not log in (up to 5000). Disadvantages are that watched pages are not bolded and that you can not use Enhanced Recent Changes. After obtaining the Recent Pages page you can log in, of course.
However, sometimes when not logged in and also when you are logged in the limit is lower, but it is not clear how much it is. If a request would involve more, no edits are given, nor any error message: the response is a blank page (not to be confused with no response; the response is a HTML page with nothing in the body part); alternatively after 30 minutes the system still says it is busy, but nothing is shown.
Checking changes for a longer period is restricted to watched pages (use "My watchlist" in combination with "Revision history"), 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"). See also below.
[edit] Other features showing lines about edits
See Help:Edit summary#Places_where_the_edit_summary_appears.
[edit] Lines about edits of pages that have later been renamed (moved) or deleted
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.
This is caused by the fact that Recent Changes pages, etc., are created on demand, based on the pages that exist at the time of the request, and on the name they have at that time.
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).
- MediaWiki User's Guide: The Recent Changes page (2004-04-09, 18:48 UTC). In Meta, a wiki about Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_The_Recent_Changes_page
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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?
