Screencast on using Wikipedia's view history button: transcript

Key points

• The view history button at the top of an article opens a list of all previous revisions.
• Each entry shows the date, the user name, the number of bytes changed and the edit comment.
• Clicking a date opens an old version, marked by a yellow box, but it is hard to see what changed.
• Clicking the previous link opens a diff showing the older version on the left and the newer on the right, with changes highlighted.
• Next Edit and Previous Edit let you follow how an article grew, and a small m marks a minor edit.
• Clicking article returns to the current version.

Chapters

1. 0:00Opening the view history list
2. 0:40What the revision list shows
3. 1:24Viewing old versions and diff links
4. 2:29Walking through edits with next and previous
5. 3:08Minor edits and returning to the current version

Full transcript

0:00Hello, I'm Ichdunich and today I want to tell you something about the revision history and the view history button in the Wikipedia. If you look at an article, you always see the current revision, that means the last version that was saved of that article. And in order to see previous versions, you can click on the view history button. That's one of those buttons on top of the article page. So I click on view history and now I can see a list of all previous revisions.

0:40So you can see this is a very very long list in this article. The list will always show me the date when the last revision was saved or when the change was made and the name of the user who made the change and some further information like how many bytes have been changed and very important i can see the comment or description which the user has written down when he saved his edit okay if i want to see an older revision i can just click on one of those older dates to see that older revision. Take this one.

1:24Now a yellow box has appeared on top of the article, pointing out that this is an old version of the article which I'm looking at. And when I scroll down now, I will have difficulties actually to find what is different between this version and the current version and to find out what exactly has been changed compared to previous versions. it is easier if I go back to the view history view it is actually easier not to click on a date to see the full version but to click on previous that's abbreviation for previous and we'll open a diff link we call that a diff link now the difference between two revisions is displayed the version which I had just

2:29looked at on the right side and the previous version on the left side and there's a highlight showing what exactly has been changed and as you can see this was a very very minor change only one bar has been added And I can walk through the revision history by clicking Next Edit or Previous Edit. And that way I can just follow the way an article has grown. So if I go further, click again on Next Edit.

3:08and if you look at the this small m that signifies this is a minor edit when you are saving your edit you have the option to tick a box saying this is just a minor edit and this will help other wikipedians when they look at a revision history to identify minor edits like this one compared to substantial more substantial ones okay and anytime I want I can just go back to the current version by clicking on article i hope that gave you an idea how the revision history works and how you can find out about the changes made from one version to another by looking at the revision history.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Viewhistory.webm by Ichdunich (2020-05-29), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.