Recent changes

Highlight of the Recent changes link in the left hand sidebar.

The Recent Changes page lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in WikiEducator. Using this page, you can monitor and review the work of other users, tracking where activity is occurring and allowing mistakes to be corrected. There is a link to the Recent changes page in the sidebar of each page as highlighted in the figure to the right.

Understanding Recent Changes

The below screenshot is an example of the kind of text that you can see if you click on the Recent changes link in the navigation box on the left hand sidebar of this page. The text shows nine edits: the first (top most) edit is to a page called DEHub/Research Themes/Learner characteristics (framed in red) by the user called Alan Wylie; and the last edit (bottom most) is the creation of a user page called User:Meta by the user called Meta. All the red links in the figure are to pages that have not yet been created.

Nine entries from Wikieducator's <a href="Special:RecentChanges">Recent changes</a> page. The red frame highlights the link to the page that has been changed, the grey rectangle highlights the link to the user page, the blue rectangle highlights the <a href="Special:Log/upload">upload log</a> for uploaded files, the purple rectangle highlights the diff (or version comparison) link, and the green rectangle highlights the history link.

From left to right here's what is happening in the above sample of the Recent changes:

• diff links to a Difference between revisions page that highlights what was changed on the page for this edit (more on diffs in the next section). See light purple rectangle in the fifth entry.

An uploaded file entry, like the second and fourth entries, has a slightly different syntax. The blue rectangle in the fourth entry shows the link to the upload log instead of diff and hist links. In addition, the file name is indicated after the link to the user's page.

• hist links to the Revision history page, also accessible from the history tab at the top of every page. The Revision history page shows not just this edit but also older (and possibly newer) versions of the page. See green rectangle on the eighth entry.
• A bold N indicates that the page is "new", i.e., previously did not exist. Highlighted with the purple arrow and the New Page text box.
• A bold m indicates that the user marked the edit "minor", indicating the revision the user made to the page listed is quite small. See Libre resources in the example highlighted with the black arrow and the Minor edit text box.
• The link following the two dots accesses the version of the page that was changed. See DEHub/Research Themes/Learner characteristics in the example framed in red at the top.
• Following the page link is the time of the edit in UTC. You can change the time displayed to your time zone using your user preferences page. See the 03:09 displayed in the final listing.
• Following another two dots is a listing of the number of bytes that were added to the file. See the (+15) displayed in the final listing.
• Following the third set of two dots, is a link to the user page for the user who made the edit. See gray rectangle in the third entry.

As usual with internal links, the view page displays if the page exists, the edit page displays if it does not, the two being styled differently.

• To the right of the user page link is a link to the user's talk and contributions pages separated by the vertical bar ( | ).

The same remarks regarding existence apply.

• The right-most parenthetical text in each entry is an editorial comment (if it was added) briefly describing what changed in the page.

The recent changes entries may have a different order if you have checked the Enhanced recent changes (JavaScript) on the Recent changes tab in your preferences.

Activity

Let's take a look at how this function works. Open a new tab or browser window to allow you to switch between this tutorial and another window. This way you can practice using the tools while still having access to these instructions. To open a new tab or browser in Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox, click File>New Tab or the key combination Ctrl/Command+T (or simply click on the small tab on the right of the tab bar - has a "+" sign in Firefox and Chrome). To switch between tabs, click on the tab you want to go to or, on some computers, use the key combinations Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown. In your new tab window, go to "http://WikiEducator.org " Click on the Recent changes link in the navigation menu to the left of this screen and take a look at some of the changes that have been made recently. (Use the back arrow to move back between pages as you click on the various links on this screen to see what changes have been made.) Once you are a little more familiar with this return to this tutorial page either clicking on the tab for your "Wikieducator" window at the top of the screen or by clicking Ctrl+Page Up.

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