Help:How to use diffs
Contents
How to use diffs
On Wikialpha, and any other wiki that uses the WMF software, contributors can and should use what are known as "diffs" when talking about specific revisions to a page, or to a series of revisions to a page.
There are two ways to capture a diff, so you can use it in a discussion, later. One approach starts with the page where the edit occurred. The other approach starts with the contributor who made the edit(2) you think require discussion.
Every editable page should have an associated revision history page
There should be a button at the top of each image, article, or other page labelled history. If you click on this button the system will display a list of all the recent edits to the article. If the article has had more edits than will fit on a single screen, there are navigation buttons to take you to a list of earlier edits, or to a list of the oldest edits.
Every edit in that list describes a single edit. That marks when someone opened up the page, in the editor, made a change, and clicked save.
When a contributor provided a bried edit summary for their edit, that edit summary is recorded as the rightmost field in the list. Please always provide a brief edit summary, even if it is brief, and generic, like "copy editing".
Each entry in the revision history list usuaully has 6 clickable links. The first two, labeled cur and prev link to specific revisions. The third link will be a time-stamp, also point to that revision, but it is not as useful in discussions as the first two, so I will ignore it for this discussion.
The sixth field in entries in the list of revisions to a page is the list of contributions made by the contributor who made the edit. I'll cover that below.
If you click on the cur button you will be shown a version of that article that highlights how the version described in the revision list differs from the most recent, or current version. That page might say something like:
(One intermediate revision by one other user not shown) (No difference) |
That means that, while someone made some changes to the article, the article was rolled back, so it was identical to the older version.
If changes had been maded the page you are shown will show you two columns. Each column will show you passages from the article, where a change was made. Change will be highlighted through colour and font differences.
These pages are extremely useful, in discussions.
Capturing the URL of a diff, so you can use it in a discussion
Your browser will usually have, near the very top, a line that contains the URL to the page you are looking at. You should be able to place your computer's pointer device on that URL, and then highlight, and copy that URL. When you paste that URL in a discussuion other contributors can click on it, and see the specific change that concerned you.
There is another way to capture that URL. Back at the page with the list of revisions, you should be able to hover over the cur or prev button, highlight the link, and then call up a submenu that lets you capture the underlying URL.
I wrote above that you could get a diff that showed the changes from multiple revisions. The cur button is a special case of this. On each entry in the revision list, between the 2nd and 3rd fields, there are a pair of "radio buttons". If you want to render a diff showing the changes over a series of revisions, select the rightmost radio button on the last revision in your series. Then go down and select the leftmost radio button on the entry BEFORE the first revision in your series. Finally, got to the top of the list of revisions, and click on the button labelled compare selected revisions.
As described above, you can highlight, and copy the URL from the URL bar, once you specified and selected the range of revisions you wanted to examine and discuss.
Every contributor should have an associated page listing every edit they made
I said I would talk about pages that list the contributions from a single userid. These pages looks similar to the pages that list the revisions to a single page. These lists are in chronological order, like that other lists. But they have fewer fields, and only two of the fields are the same. Like the other list the edit summary field is the last field. The timestamp field, identical to the timestamp field in the article revision history list, is the first field. As above it is less useful than the third field.
The third field, diff, works identically to the diff field in the article revision history list.
So, why would you look at the contribution history of another editor, in this kind of detail?
Well, maybe they are a vandal, who has made the same kind of vandalistic edits to multiple pages you started... In that case it is easier to capture those multiple diffs from this page, pasting them one at a time in your discussion, than to visit every vandalized page.
How to use the URLs to diffs in discussions
The render engine will render ordinary URLs as clickable links, unless they are are enclosed in a single pair of brackets
[]
| source code | renders as | notes |
|---|---|---|
|
| |
|
|
