The history of articles in the wiki is an important tool to trace changes, and to see who has contributed on a given article. It's also very useful when restoring vandalism.
Wikis and History
Wikis can only grow. Every single change in a wiki is saved, and that includes deleting material or articles, removing images, or replacing obsolete information. Even when contributors restore vandalism, every change is saved for future reference. The history pages of the wiki is the foundation to make this possible. It's a great way of being able to see who made changes, what they did and when. The history page can also easily compare the difference between two revisions, regardless of when they were made.
Seeing as anyone can edit DiabloWiki without any impairments, there are chances of getting vandals making changes as well. Deleting article content or adding new content that is not in line with the wiki, such as swear words, or just highly opinionated material. The history page comes well in hand to see who the vandal is, and what they did. The Special:Recentchanges page is an overview of all changes to the Wiki, and a great place to start looking for wanted or unwanted changes. The individual history page for each article will tell exactly what happened, and when.
Article History Uses
The article history has one single use, and that is to see what has changed with a given article over the course of time. There are a few things you can do with the actual history page:
- See a list of all recent and ancient changes.
- See who did them and when.
- Links to the different revisions of the page.
- Compare different revisions.
- Easily restore vandalised articles.
The Listing
The listing should be fairly obvious. One entry for each new save of the article. You can open any of them to see how they look, or look to the right and see who did it and when. WARNING: if you do open an older version of that article, be aware that if you save it, it will overwrite the newest revision. Sometimes this is needed to restore an older version, and sometimes this is a bad idea.
Compare
You can also use the wiki to compare different revisions to easily see what is changed. To do so, use the left column of selection to mark which the oldest one you want to compare, and then click the right column selection for the newest. The wiki will then give you a summary of the differences between these two versions (which in most cases include all changes in between).
Restore Vandalism
As mentioned, open a revision that is not vandalised, and save it to restore the vandalism.