Help:Recent changes

The Recent changes page lists the most recent changes to wiki pages. This page can be used to monitor changes to the wiki so that mistakes can be corrected and vandalism removed.

What does it mean?

By default, the recent changes page shows changes that have taken place in the last 30 days. You can change this in your preferences. It looks something like this:

14 December 2006

• (diff) (hist) . . m FR Publications; 22:09 . . (+23) . . Keith (Talk | contribs) (Reformatted)
• (diff) (hist) . . N Nantlle Railway; 19:21 . . (-36) . . Jim (Talk | contribs) (← Created page with The Nantlle railway...)

Reading across from the left:

• "diff" takes you to a diff between the latest version and the previous version. If this is a new page, "diff" is shown as plain text
• "hist" takes you to the history for this page
• m indicates that the user marked the change as a minor edit
• N indicates that this is a new page
• The page name links to the current version of the page
• The time of the edit is shown
• A number in brackets shows the change in page size. If the change significantly reduced the size of the page, the number will be in bold. The number will be green if the page has grown, red if it has shrunk
• The username of the person who edited the page is shown. If they were not logged in, their IP address or hostname will be shown instead. If they are a registered user, clicking on the name will take you to their User page. If they are not a registered user, clicking on the name will take you to a list of their recent contributions
• The "talk" link takes you to the talk page for the user who made the edit
• The "contribs" link takes you to a list of their recent contributions
• Finally, the edit summary is shown if one was entered by the user or generated automatically

Preferences

By logging in, you can set your preferences to modify the behaviour of Recent Changes in a number of ways. You can:

• Hide minor edits in recent changes - this hides all edits that have been marked as minor;
• Enhanced Recent Changes - with this option enabled, multiple edits are grouped together. This option uses JavaScript and won't work in every browser. See Help:Enhanced recent changes for more information.
• 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.

Viewing more recent changes

When you view the recent changes page, there is a link near the top of the page saying "List new changes from" followed by the time at which the page was generated. Clicking on this link will show you the changes that have happened since the specified time, allowing you to list the changes you have not yet seen.

Moving and deleting pages

"Recent changes" is not a true log. When a page is moved, all "recent changes" entries relating to the page are moved to its new name. When a page is deleted, all "recent changes" entries relating to the page are also deleted.

Top of the Recent Changes page

The text at the head of the "recent changes" page is taken from MediaWiki:Recentchangestext. It can be changed if required, but any changes should first be discussed on FestWiki talk:Recentchangestext.

Feeds

The information shown on the recent changes 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 wiki.