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Help:Recent changes

 

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 and in the sidebar of each page. 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:

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):

<nowiki>http://textbook.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges

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