Help:Recent Changes
The Recent Changes page lets you see the most recent edits made to pages on this website. Using this page, users can monitor and review the work of other users, allowing mistakes to be corrected and vandalism to be eliminated. There is a link to the Recent Changes page at the top of each page and in the sidebar of each page. You can also create a link to the page as [[Special:Recentchanges]].
Understanding Recent Changes
The bulk of the page consists of fifty lines, one for each edit, looking like this:
- (diff) (hist) . . m Family:Whitney, Ezra (1760-1842); 09:55 . . Tdoyle (Talk) (Added Locality Categories)
- (diff) (hist) . . N Archive:Land Records; 08:46 . . Rlward (Talk)
This indicates two edits: the first by Tim Doyle to Family:Whitney, Ezra (1760-1842); and the second by Robert Ward to Archive:Land Records.
From left to right:
- "diff" links to the diff-page for this edit; it is not available for new pages, or for page moves
- The "hist" link corresponds to the Page history link on the edited page: it shows not just this edit but also older and newer ones. For page moves, the hist link leads to the history of the new page title
- A bold m indicates that the user marked the edit "minor".
- A bold N indicates that the page is "new", i.e., previously did not exist. It is possible for a change to possess both the "minor" and "new" indicators.
- The next link is a link to the current version of the page in question.
- The times listed will have been adjusted to your local timezone, provided you have set that in your preferences. If you haven't, the times will be in UTC format.
- The next link is a link to the editor's user homepage (as usual with internal links, the view page if the page exists, the edit page if it does not, the two being styled differently).
- Finally, there is a link to the user's talk page (the same remarks regarding existence apply).
- For page moves, a link is given to both the old and new title.
Preferences
Logged in users can set preferences to adjust the way that Recent Changes looks. For help in doing this, see how to log in and how to set preferences. The options that affect recent changes are:
- Hide minor edits in recent changes - this hides all edits that have been marked as minor by logged in users;
- Enhanced Recent Changes - with this option enabled, multiple edits are grouped together. This option uses JavaScript, and won't work in every browser.
- 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.
