Help:Recent changes

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Special pages - Help

Recent changes is a special page that lists recent changes in reverse order, with change date and time, change in the page size, user who created the page, and edit summary. It also provides links to patrol these new edits when that feature is enabled.

This feature is accessible at Special:RecentChanges. The page results are adjustable using settings in the Preferences section "Recent changes".

You can choose which Recent Changes you want to display. You can combine different kinds of filters to display the results you want.

Transclusions

This special page can be transcluded, with the first unnamed parameter specifying how many entries should be displayed.

{{Special:RecentChanges/50}}

A wiki can be configured with aliases for the namespace "Special" and the title "Recent changes", and those localized versions can be used instead of the canonical ones.

Additional parameters may be used in a comma separated list such as:

{{Special:RecentChanges/days=5,limit=40,hidebots,hideminor}}

Even if a wiki is configured with aliases for the namespace and title, it is not possible to use localized parameters.

parameter	value type	description
days	integer	Maximum number of days to display
limit	integer	Maximum number of entries to display
namespace	integer	Limit results to the specified namespace, or multiple namespaces separated by semicolons
hidebots	boolean	Hide bots
bots	boolean	Show bots
hideminor	boolean	Hide minor edits
minor	boolean	Show minor edits
hideliu	boolean	Hide logged in users (LIU)
hidepatrolled	boolean	Only show pages which have not been patrolled.
hideanons	boolean	Hide Anonymous users
hidemyself	boolean	Hide the logged in user's own changes
hidecategorization	boolean	Hide page categorization
tagfilter	string	Only get entries for that tag (T142878)

Interface

The interface consists of two main parts:

At the top are the filters , which help you sort through edits.
Below that is the list of recent changes.

The filters

Filtering: This page explains how the improved filtering interface works and how to get the most out of the new tools.
Highlighting: User-defined Highlighting tools let you use color to emphasize the edits that interest you most. The functions and techniques described on this page will help you to make your Recent Changes results more meaningful.
Quality and Intent Filters: "New filters for edit review" introduces two filter groups—Contribution Quality and User Intent—that are powered by machine learning and work differently from other filters. They offer probabilistic predictions about, respectively, whether or not edits are likely to contain problems and whether the user who made them was acting in good faith. Knowing a bit about how these unique tools work will help you use them more effectively.
Bookmarks: Save and restore your favorite filters. You can also set the default filter.
Live updates: Filtered results are updated periodically.

The list of recent changes

When using the default preferences configuration, most of the page displays 50 lines, each representing an edit, arranged for left-to-right language wikis.

Below are examples of recent changes.

(diff) (hist) . . m Manual:$wgContentNamespaces; 07:07 . . (-35) . . Shirayuki (talk | contribs) (Reverted edits by Trangbe1992 (talk) to last version by 94rain) (Tag: Rollback) (thank)

(diff) (hist) . . Reporting_security_bugs/pt-br; 06:53 . . (-40) . . 187.73.25.7 (talk) (Tag: Manual revert)

Understand the list

This shows 2 edits: the first by an administrator who is logged in, to the Manual:$wgContentNamespaces page; the second by an un-registered user to the Reporting security bugs/pt-br page.

From left to right:

The "diff" link takes you to the changes made in that edit; it's not available for new pages or page moves.
The "hist" link leads to the page's history, showing all edits, including older and newer ones. For page moves, it shows the history of the new page title.
A bold m indicates the user considered the edit "minor". Only users with the minoredit right (usually logged-in users) can mark edits as minor to prevent misuse.
A bold N shows the page is "new," meaning it didn't exist before.
The use of a bold b indicates edits made by a bot or hidden by an admin.
Bold ! indicates unpatrolled pages. See Help:Patrolled edits .
ORES is a tool used on some wikis to flag potentially harmful edits, showing them with a red "r" and a light yellow background.
A link to the current version of the page. Bold indicates it's on your watchlist.
"07:07" refers to UTC time. You can adjust it to your time zone in preferences .
(-35) Changes in bytes are shown as a green plus (+) sign for additions and a red minus (-) sign for removals.
Bold numbers highlight changes of more than 500 bytes.
For logged-in users, a link to their userpage is provided. For others, it's their User Contributions.
A link to the user's talk page is included.
For page moves, both the old and new titles are linked.

Recent changes can display up to 500 edits, or 5,000 if the URL is modified. Regardless of what filters are used, it cannot display edits older than $wgRCMaxAge (90 days by default, 30 days in Wikimedia wikis).

Page moves and deletions

Once a page has been renamed (moved), previous edits and the initial creation of the page appear in recent changes under the new name.

Once a page is deleted, previous edits and the initial creation of the page are no longer visible in recent changes or similar logs.

Edits made by bots

Bots can appear in recent changes if you include &hidebots=0" in the URL. Sysops can label certain edits as bot edits, so they won't appear in the usual recent changes. See Help:Reverting for more details.

Advanced features

Hide the filters

Users can choose not to use the filters by clicking "Hide" on the filters panel. Users can opt out of the new filters by going to the "Advanced options" section at the bottom of Special:Preferences on the wikis they are active on and selecting "Use non-JavaScript interface".

The old configuration documentation is available for users.

Web feed

To get web feeds (RSS and Atom) for a wiki's recent changes, add "&feed=rss" or "&feed=atom" to the URL of the recent changes page. This shows the differences for several edits, each with a link to the current page. Some browsers may offer options like sorting by author. See also Syndication for more details.

Differences from page history

Each line in the page history represents a single change made to the page and the version that resulted from it.

"prev" is similar to "diff" mentioned earlier.
"cur" shows the changes between this version and the latest one, including all edits made afterward, even those not listed in this revision history because they happened after loading this page.

The "cur" and "prev" features resemble those in the improved recent changes , except for the "cur" in the initial line: it isn't linked in the revision history, unlike in the improved recent changes where it shows the changes from the last edit.

See Places where the edit summary appears.