Chapter 5. Who Did What: Page Histories and Reverting
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Most of the time thatâs a good thingâmillions of people have made positive contributions to the largest group-writing effort in human history. Then there are the problem children: those who canât resist the urge to deface an article, or delete all its content (a practice known as blanking a page), and those who add incorrect information, deliberately or by mistake. Fortunately, Wikipedia has robust change-tracking built into it: Whatever one editor does, another can reverse, returning an article to precisely what it was before.
Apart from vandalism, as an editor youâre likely to want to see what other editors do to articles youâve edited, whether theyâre on your watchlist (Wikipediaâs Standard Watchlist) or not. While Wikipediaâs change-tracking system isnât hard to understand, youâll probably find it isnât totally intuitive. In this chapter youâll learn how to quickly read through even a convoluted page history, how to see whatâs happened since you last edited an article, how to restore an earlier version of an article with just a few clicks, and how to deal with a problem edit followed by other edits you donât want to delete.
Understanding Page Histories
When youâre working on, say, an Excel spreadsheet, you canât turn back time and look at what the document was like last Tuesday at 10:05 a.m. Wikipedia is differentâits database has a copy of every version of every ...
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