Wikipedia:Recent Changes : Wikipedia:How to use the Recent Changes page

The Recent Changes page lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in Wikipedia. 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 the page and in the sidebar. You can also create a link to the page as [[Special:Recentchanges]].

Table of contents

1 Understanding Recent Changes

2 Preferences

3 Viewing new changes starting from a particular time

4 Restriction on number of edits

5 Other Wikipedia features showing lines about edits

5.1 Revision history (also called page history)
5.2 Related changes
5.3 User contributions
5.4 Newly created articles

Understanding Recent Changes

With the default preferences, the bulk of the page consists of fifty lines, one for each edit, looking like this:

(diff) (hist) . . List of astronomers; 10:06 . . 128.214.14.50 (Talk)
(diff) (hist) . . M Jelly; 10:06 . . Theresa knott (Talk) (Adding a link)
(diff) (hist) . . N Papal States; 01:39 . . Michael Hardy (Talk) (moved to "Papal_states")

This indicates three edits: the first by a user who isn't logged in, to List of astronomers; the second by Theresa knott to Jelly; and the third by Michael Hardy to Papal States.

From left to right:

In a line showing the most recent edit to an article at the time of creating the Recent Changes list, the diff link shows the changes introduced by this edit, and also any edits that have taken place since the Recent Changes page was loaded. For other lines, it shows the changes in that edit only.
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.
A bold M indicates that the user marked the edit "minor". Only logged in users can mark edits minor, to avoid abuse.
A bold N indicates that the article is "new", i.e., previously did not exist in the Wikipedia. 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.
10:06 refers to the time in UTC. You can change the time to your time zone using your preferences - see how to set preferences.
For logged in users, the next link is a link to their homepage, and will be in blue if the page exists, red if it doesn't. For users who are not logged in, the next link is a link to their User Contributions.
Finally, there is a link to the user's talk page. This will be blue if the talk page exists, red if it doesn't.

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 (see Wikipedia:Browser notes). See Wikipedia:Enhanced Recent Changes
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 new changes starting from a particular time

If you have loaded the recent changes at, for example, 09:45 Feb 25, 2003, it gives a link "Show new changes starting from 09:45 Feb 25, 2003", giving you the changes you have not seen yet. In order to use this link later, after you have used the browser window for other things, or if you switch off the computer in between, you can instruct your browser to bookmark it (with IE: right-click on the link and choose "add to favorites"). Alternatively, you can save the page with recent changes.

To get the new changes without one of these preparations, use (in this case, if the time above is UTC+1):

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20030225084500

(format yyyymmddhhmmss, UTC time).

You can copy this URL to the address bar and change date and time.

The "Number of titles in recent changes" set as preference is applicable.

The text at the top of Recent Changes is set on Wikipedia:Recentchanges, which can be edited when necessary.

Restriction on number of edits

There seems to be a limit on the number of edits that can be shown, somewhere between 2000 and 2500. If a request would involve more, none are given, nor any error message: the response is a blank page. At the current edit rate this means that the recent changes of the last 12 hours can be shown, but not those of 24 hours.

Other Wikipedia features showing lines about edits

Revision history (also called page history)

Every line represents one edit to the given page and the version resulting from it

"last" is similar to "diff", explained above
"cur" gives the difference between this version and the current one (i.e., excluding the edit shown by pressing the "last" next to it), which is the cumulation of all later edits, including those which are not in this revision history because they were made after loading this page
the date and time link to the version of that day and time, except that in the first line, which is about the latest edit at the time of loading this revision history, the date and time link to the current version, hence with the changes made after this revision history was loaded;

The "cur" and "last" features are similar to those in Enhanced Recent Changes, except for "cur" in the first line: it isn't linked in the revision history, while in the Enhanced Recent Changes it gives the differences corresponding to the last edit; just after loading the revision history this is the same as the "cur" link of the second line gives, but if there have been edits after loading it is different.