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Help:Tracking changes

From AstrologyNotes

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

Recent Changes

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 recentchanges 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 signalizes a new page,
  • m a minor edit,
  • b an edit made by a bot.

Following the timestamp the user is mentioned with a link to his user and talk page and to his contributions. In italic follows a comment if the user has submitted one.

User Preferences

In Special:Preferences you can specify how many titles you want to see listed in the recent changes list. If you visit the main recent changes page, you will see the number you specified in your user preferences. For example, you can choose to see the last:

25 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500 major changes

You can also choose whether to hide minor edits from the list, and whether to use the enhanced view (which groups all edits on the same page on the same day together).

Related Changes

The "Related changes" feature lists the last change in each article linked to from the current page, provided that it is recent enough, and not more than the number specified in the preferences. Its header is "Recent changes" with subheader "(to pages linked from "xxx")". Related Changes does not include changes in articles that link to the current page unless the current page also links to them.

If you have the option "Hide minor edits" enabled in your user preferences and the last edit of a page linked to by the current page was minor, than neither that nor the last major change is shown.


Note that for links to redirects, only a change in the redirect is given, not a change in the target article. In this regard it is better to change such links to ones linking directly to the target article.

The "Related changes" feature neither lists changes in images or sound files nor in image description pages (regardless of which of the three linking methods (image, :image or media) is used.

See also

Note.png Tip for wiki admins: You may want to add important pages in your wiki to MediaWiki:Recentchangestext, the intro shown at Special:Recentchanges
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