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 a 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 recent changes 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 upload log 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 the diff-page (or page that allows the user to compare differences in versions of the same page) for this edit (more on diffs in the next section). For example, the 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.

• The "hist" link corresponds to the history link on the edited page: it shows not just this edit but also older and newer ones to this page. For example the green rectangle on the eighth entry.
• A bold N indicates that the page is "new", i.e., previously did not exist. For example, the final edit in the figure highlighted with the purple arrow.
• A bold m would indicate that the user marked the edit "minor" (i.e. Libre_resources highlighted with the black arrow and the minor edit text box.).
• The next link is a link to the current version of the page in question (i.e. DEHub/Research Themes/Learner characteristics which is framed in red.).
• The 03:09 in the final entry refers to the time of the edit in UTC. You can change the time to your time zone using your user preferences page.
• The (+15) in the final entry indicates that +15 bytes were added to the file.
• The next link is a link to the user homepage.

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

• Next, there is a link to the user's talk and contributions pages separated by the vertical bar ( | ).

The same remarks regarding existence apply

• Finally, the right most parenthetical text is an editoral 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. (This will allow you to switch between this tutorial and another window where 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 Ctrl/Command T. To switch between tabs, click on the tab you want to go to or, on some computers, Ctrl Tab or Ctrl Pg Up/Down. 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 the tutorial 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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