Help:Page history
A page history shows the order in which edits were made to any editable Wikipedia page, the difference between any two revisions, and a menu of special external tools. A page history is sometimes called revision history or edit history.
You can view a page's history by clicking the “View history” tab at the top of the associated page (pictured right). See § Mobile version for the mobile version of the site which works differently.
The page history contains a list of the page's previous revisions, including the date and time—in UTC by default—of each edit, the username or IP address of the user who made the change, and an optional edit summary that briefly describes or explains the change. For example, the page history for this help page shows it was first created on September 20, 2004, and that it has been changed more than 500 times since then.
On every "page history" page, before the history begins, there are links to several external tools for analyzing or correcting a page. On Wikipedia, these are:
The edits are listed in chronological order from newest to oldest, and are displayed with each edit being their own row in the list, with each row taking up one line of text. Each entry in the edit history will show the time and date that the edit was applied, the username or IP address of the contributor who saved the edit, the total size of the resulting page text (in bytes), the net size difference (in bytes) that the changes made from the edit resulted on the page [note 1], the edit summary that was added by the contributor, as well as other technical and diagnostic information. Let's look at some of the functions of this page:
Not shown in this example: some edits may be automatically tagged by the abuse filter (example: (Tag: references removed)); any tags applied appear after the edit summary. Tags cannot be added or removed manually, and are intended to help editors identify potential problem edits for examination; they do not prove that an edit is problematic.
