Help:User contributions

User contributions pages list the edits that a particular user has made. These pages are project specific, so a user contributions page for the ISFDB will not show the edits that user has made to any other project.

Checking your contributions is useful to refresh your memory about which pages you have worked on (and to easily access these again), but can also be used to find out whether there have been any subsequent edits (see below). This makes it possible to "watch" pages even if you haven't put them on your watchlist. Other users' user contribution pages can also be accessed and are useful for seeing how other users have contributed. They can be used to track down vandals, copyright violations, etc. as well as to work togetehr with another user on a joint project.

Accessing a user contributions page

Accessing your own user contributions page

• To access your own user contributions page, click my contributions. This is displayed either at the top of the page, or on the left hand side.

Accessing other user's user contributions page

• If the user has an account (username): bring up the user page and click User contributions - this works even if the user page has not been edited yet (i.e. an edit box displays).
• If the user has no login name, two methods are:
  • Click on the IP address in Recent Changes or Page History
  • Put the IP address in the search box and press Go

Using a user contributions page

Edits are shown from newest to oldest. Each edit takes up one line which shows; time & date, the page name and the edit summary, as well as other diagnostic information. Lets have a look at some of the functions of this page:

1. The username or IP of the contributor appears at the top.
2. You can select a namespace to filter your results. For example, to see only templates select Template from the drop down list and press Go.
3. The leftmost column gives the time and date of the edit.
4. (hist) takes you to the page history, so you can see all edits made to that page. This can be useful if someone has updated a page you have worked on, and you want to see their changes.
5. (diff) takes you to a diff page showing the changes between that edit and the previous revision. The revision after the edit appears below the changes so you can see the result of the edit.
6. When present, m stands for minor edit (small corrections to a page). These help you understand the type of changes that have been made.
7. To the right of the (diff) column is the name of the page the edit took place on. The current page name is used, so if the page has been renamed the name displayed will be different.
8. To the right of the page name is the edit summary. It is the text the user wrote in the edit summary box (below the edit box).
9. When present, (top) signifies that the edit is the current revision. The page is as the user last saved it. This can be used to watch pages (if your last edit to the page does not display (top) the page has been changed). Sysops also have a rollback link here, see Help:Reverting.
10. Some edit summaries begin with an arrow link and grey text. This means the user has only edited a section of the page (named in the grey text). This text is automatically added when you edit a section. The arrow is a link to the section. The black text is a standard edit summary and is added by the user.
11. When a user's edits require more than one page to list, links are avaialable to take you to the users most recent edits (Latest), oldest edits (Earliest) or the next or previous page of edits (Next n / Previous n).
12. The blue numbers list the number of edits displayed on a page - 20, 50, 100, 250 or 500. A higher number increases the length of a page but reduces the number of pages. The number you select replaces n in the links to the previous or next pages e.g. (Next 100 / Previous 100).

If the page is newly created the mark "N" is also shown.

But the following information does not appear:

• Edits from a page that has been deleted afterwards (unless the page, including the revision concerned, has been restored). If the revision concerned has been restored but not the previous one, then the fact that the user has edited the page is preserved, including the time and the edit summary, and the resulting revision, but not the change. A sysop can use Special:DeletedContributions to see revisions that have not been restored. However, applying a diff is not directly possible.
• Uploading a new image with the same name as one that already exists, thus replacing it
• The deletion or restoration (undeletion) of a page (if the user is a sysop). Use Special:Logs for this.

URLs and links

A user contributions URL looks like this: https://isfdb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=XX or https://isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Contributions/XX (for this wiki) where XX is the user name or IP address.

Change the sub-site to view your contributions on that particular subsite. (www.wikipedia.org, meta.wikimedia.org, etc.)

To link to a user contributions page you can also use this shorter form: Special:Contributions/XX.

You can view edits from only one namespace. Each namespace has an associated number. Restricting to one namespace can be done with the long form URL only (in this example the namespace is number 4): https://isfdb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=XX&namespace=4

Privacy

Your contributions can be viewed by anyone - please be mindful of this. Check the Privacy Policy for more information.

First edit

When using the user contributions feature to determine when a user starting editing on a wiki, note that edits may have been made in another wiki, while later the page has been imported.

Also, until ca. 2004 there was a bug, which has been fixed but not retroactively, as follows:

If a moved page is moved back, the edit history of the page with the intermediate title shows the latest move only, with the corresponding user name, but with the date and time of the first move(!).

Therefore, if the oldest entries in the user contributions list are moves, they most likely do not represent any activity of the user on the stated dates.

Number of edits

The user profile shows the number of edits. The number is based upon an editcount field that is stored for each user, incremented each time the user makes an edit, but not decremented when a user's edit is deleted. Therefore the count includes deleted edits. It does not include moves.

This page is derived from the MediaWiki help page on User contribution