Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Advanced Techniques

Once you’ve mastered the steps in the previous section, you can revert or undo any edit on any Wikipedia page. You can lead a long, happy life without going any further. But if you devote yourself to lots of article repair and restoration, you may appreciate help from some power-user tools, like the three described next.

Customization

If you’re an experienced editor who spends a lot of time looking at page histories, consider some customization to enhance the history display:

• The user script at User:Stevage/EnhanceHistory.user.js collapses consecutive edits from the same person into one. It also adds a button so that diffs show up on the history page rather than a separate page. (Chapter 21 provides details about getting a user script to work.)

• Another minor—but useful—customization often makes it much easier to locate what’s been removed or added in a page change when the change involves just a period, comma, dash or other small single character. Add the following to your monobook.cs page (which you’ll probably need to create, as a subpage, per the instructions on Creating Your Personal Sandbox):

.diffchange {padding: 0px 2px 0px 2px; border: 1px dashed red; margin: 0px 1px
0px 0px}

Automated Identification of the Editor of Specific Text

You may find yourself digging through a large number of prior versions of a page, trying to identify exactly who added a given bit of text, and when (for example, to find out if whoever added the text did anything else questionable ...