Help talk:Page history

Deleting part of the history of a page?

I would like to delete part of the page history of a page in my user area. I plan to subsequently move the page into a regular article (preserving the rest of the history of the page). Can anyone help me? The article is User:Ksheka/Staging, and I would like to delete everything before March 18, 2007. Ksheka 13:59, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

You should try WP:Requests for Oversight, but be aware that this action will not be performed lightly. You need a very good reason, such as edits containing personal information, or libelous BLP violations. --Thinboy00 @038, i.e. 23:55, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

How to get at an uploaded file's date

I'm working with a company designing its own wiki, and we're facing a sticky point ...

We have many internal company documents, and want to get at a doc's latest update, i.e., when was Image:User dino.jpg last updated? When was the annual report last changed? And that data on interest rates ...

Is there a way to "grab" these data & display them? Or just grab them — we'll figure out how to display them.

I realize, this may seem from left field, but thought I'd toss it out there. Thanks for any ideas. You may reply here or on my talk page.

dino 22:31, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

The "undo" field in a history line

What is the purpose of the "undo"? How could one undo a revision other than the last? (I dare not click on it, for fear of actually undoing a revision.)

Arie ten Cate (talk) 22:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

The "undo" link will not undo edits in one click. See Wikipedia:Undo for how it works. If you click on it, you will see a page similar to the page you get when clicking "edit this page," but with the revision removed. In some cases (e.g. when others have edited the content added by the contribution) it will not work. --Thinboy00 @035, i.e. 23:50, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

good best —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.162.119.68 (talk) 05:45, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Shouldn't this be in the article? I came here specifically for information on the undo button, and I found the fact that it was simply absent from the sample picture and the article doesn't even mention it frustrating.Terminal157 (talk) 19:59, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Missing page history

The beer article is missing all of it's page history before December 13 2001. Does anyone know why this is or know who I should ask about it? Is there any way to retrieve the first few edits to the page? Thank you. Jecowa (talk) 04:42, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

There are two parameters in a edit version: the datestamp for the edit and the revision number for the creation of a record. I believe the page history datestamps are mostly accurate, but the revision numbers for very old versions of articles are not reliable because old articles and page histories may have been imported between different servers or computer systems as they were upgraded several times, and not have been always imported in a strict chronological sequence, resulting in discrepancies between the datestamp order and the revision number order.

The earliest version of the "Beer" article in the page history is version #238028, dated 2001-12-13 07:48:00; versions earlier than that were probably lost or deleted. Note that the edit summary of version #238028 was addition of a Kaiser quote, but the rest of the article is still very dependent upon this book, likely its original source.

Seemingly, page histories follow the order of datestamps, while "previous version" or "next version" diff links follow the order of the revision number. In the case of the "Beer" article, confusion may arise because version #238028 still links to a "previous version" (to #197646 dated 2002-09-05 13:39:00), and so on, up to the lowest-numbered version #5012 dated 2002-02-04 22:41:54; but if you take notice, the whole block of "previous versions" are all dated later, not earlier, than #238028. And conversely, in the lowest numbered version #5012 (likely the first "Beer" revision to be imported into the database), the link to a "previous version" is grayed, even though there are five versions older in date than 2002-02-04 22:41:54.

(Please someone correct or supplement me if I am wrong. There is no much information written about Wikipedia article revision numbers.) --HYC (talk) 00:07, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Navigation

Couldn't we make navigating page histories easier? It's already problematic that it's very difficult to get any feel for what is happening without inspecting each edit closely, but surely we could make it easier to view page histories in large blocks. If a page has more than 500 edits, all you can see is 'next 500'. You don't know if there are 501 or fifty thousand. Can't we at least have a "This page has had received X edits since it was created on X day". Better still, couldn't there be a small 'menu' like option where one could choose from edit blocks to view, e.g. Show the numbers 1 to 7 so the browser can choose a block of 500 to pick from, rather than having to press 'back' 6 times to get to the first 500 edits? Or at least a 'skip to first edit' function, if this is too difficult. Richard001 (talk) 06:33, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Link to page version comparison

Hello all- I hope this is where to make a suggestion for this help page. I think it would be helpful to add, under the section titled Linking to a specific version of a page, a note informing users that the way to make a wikilink to a version comparison is to make an external-style link using the comparison page's url. Hope I'm making sense. I think it would also be good to put this info somewhere in the help area that deals with wikilinks. I eventually found the guidance under Help:Link#External_links_to_the_same_project, but it took me a while and the method for making such a link is only implied there, as opposed to the instructions being specifically stated. I made this same post on the talk page of the master copy of this help page at meta. Thanks. -Eric ^talk 19:51, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. I wanted to flag a vandal edit on someone's talk page, so I found this page, yet the section "Linking to a specific version of a page" doesn't tell me how to link to a specific version of a page in Wikipedia!! Surely there's a better way than hardcoding an external URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carbon_footprint&oldid=331849271 -- Skierpage (talk) 22:24, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Time Zone

What timezone is used for tracking changes. My contributions page says that I made this edit on May 18, but it's still May 17. Emperor001 (talk) 00:15, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Did you find out? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.57.156.241 (talk) 18:04, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

It shows as UTC for me. 74.236.139.62 (talk) 20:22, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

How to get contributions from academia

I do not know if this is the right place to raise this issue so if anyone wants to take this discussion elsewhere, feel free to do so but leave a note here please. Anyway, the issue I want to raise is the following.

In academia, most people publish what they write in traditional journals, books, etc. To be able to get credit for a paper or any other work one would typically need to put a reference to the work in the list of publication submitted when applying for, say, tenure or grant money. What is missing is an easy and credible way of doing this for contributions to Wikipedia. I would therefore suggest that a special link for this was available, perhaps on the history page. The url could have, for example, the following format

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genetics&oldid=225193947&highlight=Jimbo_Wales,

which should produce a standard view of the page Genetics but with were user Jimbo_Wales' contributions highlighted in, say, light yellow. This should work on a per character and not per line basis. Authorship should be preserved for moved text which seems to be possible if this is based on algorithms such as User:Cacycle/diff. I guess handling reverts of old deletions may be tricky (preserving authorship of text which becomes reinserted...).

Such urls would be straightforward to include in a publication list. More importantly, such urls would be fairly straightforward to type in by reviewers involved in assessing a tenure or grant applications. Keep in mind that these reviewers can not be expected to be familiar with the inner workings of Wikipedia. The current page history is at the moment just far too cumbersome to use for these purposes.

I guess some of this perhaps will require changes in the underlying Mediawiki software?

I'm aware of the fact that the complete revision history of a page can be exported so maybe some outside tool already exist to do this? Does anyone know?

A related issue is how quality is assessed. To indicate the quality of the contribution made be the particular author, an extension of the above idea could be to include some statistics on the author-highlighted, old-version view of a page showing which percentage of the highlighted text is still present in the current version. I guess e.g. Wikipedia:Good articles and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0 are also relevant here.

How much contributions to wikipedia should count in academia compared to other works (peer reviewed research papers) is a different question. I believe this question will not be addressed seriously, however, if people are prohibited from including work on wikipedia in their list of publications for these technical reasons. Looking at some of the high quality wikipedia articles, e.g. Cryptography, I certainly think that the contributions of main authors of such articles should and would be given the same academic weight as contributions to tradional encyclopedias.

Jt68 (talk) 15:32, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Continuing this at [1].--Jt68 (talk) 15:40, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Tracking revisions by section or content?

Is it possible using MediaiWiki or an external application connected through the MediaWiki API to track the revision history of a particular section or the appearance of a certain word or phrase in the article. For example, on the "heat pipe" article someone has changed the section on "Origins and research in the United States" and left a comment the talk page as to why he attributes the invention to a different man about 20 years earlier than previously stated (which is correct). However, he has neither properly commented the changes nor signed and dated his talk page entry. I would like to see only changes to the "Origins ..." section and/or date the appearance of the words "Gaugler", "Grover", and "1944" in the article. Are there any good tools for this that would avoid doing manual comparison of each version of the article? Bdentremont (talk) 16:08, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

New screenshot needed

We need a new screenshot illustrating the page history. The image on the page is outdated, last updated in March 2007: just compare the image below with how the same page looks today (January 2009) and see the differences (excepting for a couple of lines that were doctored for the sake of ilustration):

These are the statements that are outdated (2007), with my proposed corrections (Jan 2009):

1. The page name stays the same, but the "history" tab is highlighted.

1. The page name changes to "Revision History of (article name)", and the "history" tab is highlighted.

2. These links take you to the most recent edits (Latest), oldest edits (Earliest) or the next or previous page of edits (Next n / Previous n). Note that the black text in brackets will become links, when applicable.

2. These links take you to the most recent edits (Latest), oldest edits (Earliest) or to the previous or next page of edits (Newer n / Older n). Note that the black text in brackets will become links, when applicable.

5. (last) takes you to a diff page showing the changes between that edit and the previous version. The most recent version (the one on the same line as the "last" you clicked on) appears below the changes, so you can see how the page was rendered.

5. (prev) takes you to a diff page showing the changes between that edit and the previous version. The most recent version (the one on the same line as the "prev" link you clicked on) appears below the changes, so you can see how the page was rendered.

Explanations of new features (including external tool links) should also be added (and renumbered):

#. Browse history: From year (and earlier):____ From month (and earlier):____. (explanation...)

External tools:

#. Revision history statistics. (explanation...)

#. Revision history search. (explanation...)

#. Page view statistics. (explanation...)

I would have been bold to make these corrections myself, but they would conflict with the current screenshot (perm link), so the screenshot needs to be updated first. --HYC (talk) 10:02, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Deleted images

Aren't deleted images nowadays saved so administrators can undelete them? // habj (talk) 11:00, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Page history of deleted pages

Is there any way to view page history of deleted pages? - Raziel  teatime  19:05, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

(top)

Some edit summaries are followed by (top). What does this mean? Changes to the first line of the page? Largest contributor to the page? Something else? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:33, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Doesn't it denote the last edit to the page (i.e. "this version is still on top")? I don't think it appears in page histories, though (since with a history it's obvious what's on top).--Kotniski (talk) 10:43, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Notes On Stephen Bandera

There is an error polish were not governing over the Ukrain in 1927, Soviets were! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.212.135.178 (talk) 02:33, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

97.116.169.65 (talk) 20:45, 3 November 2009 (UTC) looking for old bottles

Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:19, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Missing pages in article history

I was browsing the history of the article on Montesquieu and noticed something odd. There are several consecutive edits there which have not content. For example all edits between [this] and [this] one. Some of these blank edits have comments as if there was nothing wrong with the article. Has someone edited these old versions of the article and deleted all the contents? Would be great if anybody could explain. Thanks. MarkkuP (talk) 14:47, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like you might be looking at dummy or null edits: Help:Dummy_edit. Eric ^talk 15:41, 22 January 2010 (UTC)-

I'm note sure this is the case. What I didn't notice before was that the time between these two edits which I linked above is over two months. Isn't it very unlikely for an article be blank for such a long time? MarkkuP (talk) 21:34, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Tools for browsing article histories

Are there any readily available tools to browse article history(comparing consecutive edits) so that minor edits and those made by bots would be excluded? MarkkuP (talk) 14:49, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

'prev' or 'last'?

I'm not familiar with the history page of Wikipedia articles, but I do not find a 'prev' button in any history page or in the picture provided in the article to illustrate the usage of history pages.

The following is quoted from this help article:

To compare a version with its predecessor, click prev.

Should any change be made?

119.40.44.119 (talk) 12:44, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

The picture seems to be out of date - it has "last", but history pages themselves now seem to have "prev". (Don't they - are you seeing something different than I am?)--Kotniski (talk) 13:30, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Victory

Hi I think this is the ship that left Portsmouth Deven (or could be Plymouth which is my 1st port of information) My Great Great Grandparents left on this ship from England to Australia on 4th November 1857 if my source is correct!! Does anyone have any information on this would love to hear more as I am doing my dad's family tree!! Regards Belinda Miles —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.214.89.131 (talk) 09:57, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Edit history comparison improvement proposal

I'm new to contributing to Wikipedia, however I can see after trying to add few links and sentences that one problem happens. I viewed other "history" pages of different articles and see that comparison of newest and earliest versions are not possible to be done. To my understanding, it must be possible to see not only versions which are in nearly one time, but it might be possible to compare any number of pages versions, edited at any time. It this case it would be indeed possible for users to contribute their articles to wikipedia, and would be a way to avoid "article wars" etc. I think so. Otherwise wikipedia seems to be useless in very some future and some better alternative would be introduced. I may be wrong. But this is my understanding. If anyone thinks that comparison of versions should be improved, I would like them to contact wikipedia designers so at least in this new, now still beta-version, these issues be solved. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vedicsciences (talk • contribs) 02:06, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from 24.17.77.182, 6 June 2010

{{editsemiprotected}} I am a decendant jennifer a falk my grandfather Thomas Coseboom; and Great grandfather Thomas Coseboom Sr. worked for Mr. Bixby as a foreman on the ranch located where Cal State Univ. at Long Beach now is; in Long Beach,Ca.That is where I went to college. My family has 6 generations of relatives. Their home was on Signal Hill before oil was discovered. Signal Hill School was then named Coseboom School after great grandpa. Yhe would take a horse and buggy to the beach, as cars were not available. This would be all day affair, you would just get there and it would be time to come back home!

24.17.77.182 (talk) 08:09, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

N Not done Hi there, as no request has been made to edit the article, no edit has been made. Please make sure that in any future requests that you make you use the format "Please change x to y", otherwise it can be difficult for us to find out exactly what edit you would like to be made to the page. Thanks, Jeffrey Mall (talk • contribs) - 12:19, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Consolidating edit history

I edit pages that are a lot of times in need of many revisions/additions. However, I struggle to do all my revisions in one edit. As a result, I leave the page history full of small edits that when combined are all just the page the way I left it. I think it would be nice and more convenient for people trying to view the history if all of my related edits could be shrunk down into one edit listed. If this can be done, please let me know. If it cannot be done, I think it should be an option and anyone who knows how to suggest it to the people in charge of Wikipedia, I would appreciate if you could do that. --ATPerrin (talk) 03:55, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

bytes

It might bear emphasising that the number of bytes, written in parentheses, is to represent the size of a particular version of the article in total. It does not quantify the differences (nor even the commonality) of previous versions (relative to the current revision). This is contrary to the misleading impression one could get by scanning over the heading that "(xxx) = difference from current version ..". To the contrary, "(cur)" refers not to "(xxx bytes)", in fact it does not refer to "cur" in parentheses either; it refers to the "cur" bra (and similarly "prev" is depicted in parantheses when really it is supposed to reference its ket form). I think it would be less misleading if the header used the correct form: for example if it wrote e.g., leftbracket-cur-verticalbar does blah, and I imagine it is only the trickiness of using vertical bar symbols on wikipedia that has prevented this. (Actually, I think "does" really is preferable to "=" since it is supposed to convey an action that can be initiated rather than convey a mathematical equivalence which again would only be applicable if it were instead referring to the number of bytes rather than the hyperlink.) Meanwhile, the "(xxx bytes)" is an obvious ommission of the labelling of the diagram on this help article. Cesiumfrog (talk) 23:27, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

I notice you haven't had any response to your comment. At first, I thought you were having a little laugh at others' expense, but then something tickled my memory, and I eventually realized you have assessed rev hist in terms of Dirac quantum nomenclature: precisely accurate, but typically out-of-reach to the bulk of non-physicist, non-mathematician editors. Your suggestions may well merit a closer look, but I would suggest presenting them in a more suitable venue: maybe at the Village Pump, or the Help Desk, etc. Will attempt to copy you, in case you don't 'watch' this page.

Ragityman (talk) 12:14, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Why is my link bad? Need help

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Geoff_B&oldid=410647540

trying to put in a link on Himuro manison

What is wrong with the link or do I need to reprhase it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dragon82aa (talk • contribs) 21:46, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

I have replied at User talk:Dragon82aa -- John of Reading (talk) 22:19, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Linking to an article's history page

When I try to link to the talk page and history page of an article by cutting and pasting the title from the page and putting double square brackets around it (for example, Talk:Spork and Revision history of Spork), the link to the history page does not work. Should this help page explain how to make such a link? Guy Macon 18:20, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that method won't work - you have to copy and paste the URL from the browser address bar (and use single square brackets). I'll put in a note mentioning it.--Kotniski (talk) 08:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

External tools: Revision history statistics · Contributors · Revision history search · Number of watchers · Page view statistics

Just wondering if there is an explanation of these tools? I admit to not reading the article, but could not find "external tools" in the toc. Thanks in advance Ottawahitech (talk) 16:18, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from 58.9.8.230, 29 September 2011

58.9.8.230 (talk) 19:13, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

What exact edit are you requesting? -- John of Reading (talk) 19:21, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Needs Updating flag (screenshot w/ red & green info)

The screenshot in the article needs to be updated to show the new green and red parenthetical information, which another editor has thankfully mentioned in the text further below it. please remove the flag when done. Thanks. 5Q5 (talk) 16:43, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

I've made a new screenshot, but the descriptions of points 3, 4 and 5 need more work. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

The page could do with a separate section explaining the six tools shown in the "External tools" line, but I'm not sure how to re-organise the mixture of tools and advice that currently follow the "Overview". -- John of Reading (talk) 10:37, 3 March 2012 (UTC)