Ship arriving (almost) too late to save you from drowning in changes…

[emdebe]

The “Recent Changes” page lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in our Wiki Jawaka project. Using this page, users can monitor and review the work of other users/contributors, allowing mistakes to be corrected and vandalism to be eliminated. There is a link to the “Recent Changes” page in the sidebar of each page. You can also create a link to the page as [[[Special:Recentchanges]]].

Users can set preferences to adjust the way that “Recent Changes” looks. The options that affect recent changes are:

- Hide minor edits in Recent Changes - this hides all edits that have been marked as “minor”;

- Enhanced Recent Changes - with this option enabled, multiple edits (of the same page) are grouped together (this option uses JavaScript, and won't work in every browser);

- Number of Recent Changes - you may select the number of changes which will be shown by default on the “Recent Changes” page (once on that page, links are provided for other options).

When editing a page, a contributor has the option of flagging the edit as a "minor edit". This feature is important, because users can choose to hide minor edits in their view of the “Recent Changes” page (as stated above), to keep the volume of edits down to a manageable level. When to use this is somewhat a matter of personal preference. The rule of thumb is that an edit of a page that consists of spelling corrections, formatting, and minor rearranging of text should be flagged as a "minor edit".

A "major edit" is basically something that makes the entry worth revisiting for somebody who wants to watch the article rather closely.

Whatever you put in the comment box is the narrative for the change. If you are creating a new page, you don’t have to do anything (the system will mark the page as being “new”). When changing an existing page, give a brief synopsis of the change you have made. This gets announced on the “Recent Changes”, and makes it easier for the rest of us to see what your change is about.



Note: if valuable to more than one person, this topic could/should end up in the Wiki Jawaka (I guess)...

[emdebe]

One more thing: users can set their preferences to "mark all edits minor by default". This option automatically selects the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when you edit pages.