Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Recent Changes

This tab lets you control what appears on the Special:Recentchanges page and its sibling, the Special:Recentchangeslinked page (also known as “Related changes.” The first of these two is used in vandal-fighting (???); the second for monitoring pages (Standard RSS and Atom feeds).

This tab has four things you can change:

• Days to show in recent changes. Shortens or lengthens the total number of edits that you can see when you go to one of the two report pages. Since just one day’s worth of edits at the Recent changes page is more than 100,000, changing the limit here (from the default of “7”) affects only what you see when you click the “Related changes” link.

• Titles in recent changes. Affects how many edits you see on each page, not the total number of edits that a special page shows you (you just change the number of edits to show on the page itself). Think of this option as setting a soft limit on the number of edits displayed per page, while the first setting, “days to show”, sets a hard limit on the total report length.

• Hide minor edits in recent changes. Hiding minor edits screens out inconsequential edits so you can focus on important ones. On the other hand, depending on your paranoia level (and how important you consider the pages you’re monitoring), if you hide minor edits and a very sneaky editor improperly classifies a damaging edit as “minor”, then you’ll probably miss something you’d like to have seen. (On the other hand, there ...