Help:Page history

Every page has a link "Page history" to the list of edits. Also the Recent changes page has links to the histories of listed pages.

An exception are pages which have been deleted (not to be confused with pages that have been blanked), for which the only record available to non-administrators is the deletion log. Edits to them are not even in the User Contributions pages. However, the revision history is kept and can be retrieved by a sysop, who can also undelete the page.

Every line represents one edit to the given page and the version resulting from it

• "last" is similar to "diff", explained in Recent changes
• "cur" gives the difference between this version and the one at the time of loading the history page (i.e., excluding the edit shown by pressing the "last" next to it), which is the cumulation of all later edits, except those which are not in this revision history because they were made after loading this page
• the date and time link to the version of that day and time.

For every version there is a box on the line. Marking two boxes gives the difference between the two versions. The box at the top corresponds to the latest edit, which is not necessarily the edit about which the info on the line is (another edit may have been made after loading the page history),

If the "move page" feature has been used in the past to change the name to the current one, the entire edit history of the article, before and after the move, is shown, but the move itself is not. The move itself is shown in the edit history of the page with the old title, which automatically has become a redirect page.

After merging two pages, typically one becomes a redirect. In that case, this redirect has a real edit history.