Help:Page history

Every editable page in this wiki has a page history associated with it, listing all the changes made to the page. Each change to the page is listed on a new line.

Click on the revision number or date to view a specific version of the page
Click on (cur) to see the differences between this version of the page and the current version
Click on (last) to see the differences between this version of the page and the previous version
To see the differences between two specific versions, click the radio button in the right hand column for the newer page and the button in the left hand column for the older page, then click the "Compare selected versions" button
The username of the contributor is listed. Clicking on the username will take you to their user page. Links are also provided to their user talk page and a list of their recent contributions. If the contributor was not logged in, their IP address or hostname is listed
An m indicates that the change was flagged as a minor edit
The edit summary is given. Under some circumstances, the wiki generates an automatic edit summary, denoted by a leftward pointing arrow. A section edit is denoted by a rightward pointing arrow followed by the title of the section of the page which has changed. The rightward pointing arrow links to the changed section of the page
Clicking on undo will attempt to undo the changes made in that edit. The edit page will appear. If the changes can be undone, the text in the text box will be the current version but without the changes made in the chosen edit. If the changes cannot be undone, an error message will appear and the text box will contain the current version of the page. If you need to undo several consecutive edits, you can do this by comparing the versions. For example, if you want to remove the edits made in revisions 7, 8 and 9 of the page, select the radio buttons for versions 6 and 9, click the "Compare selected versions" button and then click the undo link on the page that appears.

The subheading near the top of the page includes a "View logs for this page" link. Clicking on this link will display all log entries relating to the page.

Reverting a page to a previous version

If a page has been vandalised, it can easily be reverted to a previous version. There are several ways of doing this:

Use the "undo" facility as described above
Administrators will see a "rollback" link by the most recent edit. Clicking on this allows them to revert the page to the most recent version edited by a different contributor

If neither of these approaches works, the best approach is:

Go to the page history and select the last good version. Be careful - this may not be the previous version. Some vandals (spammers in particular) will make multiple changes to a page in quick succession
Having selected the version, click on the revision number or date and check it carefully to make sure that this is the right version. Links will appear below the page title allowing you to easily navigate to a newer or older version of required
Once you are sure you have selected the right version, click on the "edit this page" tab. You will see a warning in a red box above the edit box about editing an old version
Fill in the edit summary. Be sure to include the word "revert" or "rv" and an explanation for the reversion. It can also be useful to include links to the usernames you are reverting from and to. Standard link syntax can be used, e.g. [[User:username|username]]
Click on the "Save page" button

Whichever approach you use to revert a page, when you have finished you should go back to the page history and compare the reverted version with the previous version by clicking (last) alongside the latest version. If you find that you have removed some bona fide changes, you are responsible for replacing those changes.

Feeds

The information shown on the history page is also available as an RSS feed or an Atom feed. An appropriate reader such as the Google Desktop Web Clips gadget can use these feeds to alert you to changes to the page. If you want a feed showing changes to the whole wiki, go to recent changes.