Help:User contributions

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Some old revisions for this page were imported under CC BY-SA license. Only new contributions are PD.

User contributions pages list the edits that a particular user has made.

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.

These pages are project specific, so a user contributions page for the English Wikipedia will not show the edits the user has made to the German Wikipedia, or to Wikimedia Commons, or to any other project.

Known issue: Filtering contributions for users that have made considerable contributions to a specific namespace, e.g. more than 1 million edits may often result in a timeout and fail (T33197).

Accessing a user contributions page

Accessing your own user contributions page

To access your own user contributions page if you are a logged-in user, click my contributions. This is displayed either at the top of the page or on the left-hand side.
If you are not logged in and want to access the user contributions page of your current IP address, type "Special:Mycontributions" into the search box and press Go.

Accessing another user's contributions page

If the user has an account (username): bring up the user page and click Toolbox and then User contributions on the left hand side. 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

Below is an example of a user contributions page using the default skin, viewing an IP range:

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 informations. Here are some of the functions of this page:

The username, IP address or IP range appears here, along with links to the log pages. If you are viewing a single user, a link to their talk page is also shown.
Here you can change which user to view contributions for. This can be a username, IP address, or IP range (in CIDR notation). Alternatively, you can tick the first radio button option to view only contributions from new users.
You can select a namespace to filter your results. For example, to see only templates select Template from the drop down list and press Search. You can also invert your namespace selection so that contributions are shown only from all other namespaces. Finally, you can use the "Associated namespace" checkbox to show subject and talk pages of the selected namespace.
The tag filter allows you to show only contributions with a specific tag. See #17 below.
These options allow to show only edits that are the latest revisions to the page and edits that are page creations. You can also show only minor edits. Finally, if the wiki has the ORES extension installed, another option allows you to hide edits that are "probably good", which may make it easier to locate edits that are vandalism.
These options allow you to view contributions within a specific date range. Both the start and end date are optional.
These links take you to the users most recent edits (newest), oldest edits (oldest) or the next or previous page of edits (newer n / older n). The blue numbers that follow 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. (newer 100 / older 100).
This gives the time and date of the edit. This link is called a "permanent link", which will bring you to the revision of the page at that specific date and time.
(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. (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.
This shows the size of the diff, in number of bytes. Negative values are shown in red, while green indicates content was added, and a gray 0 indicates the number of bytes did not change with the edit.
m stands for minor edit (small corrections to a page). In this area you might also see the symbol N, indicating the edit was a page creation. These help you understand the type of changes that have been made.
This 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.
This is the username, shown when viewing an IP range or new user contributions. This is not shown when are viewing contributions of a single user or IP.
This is the edit summary. This edit summary begins 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 black text is a standard edit summary and is added by the user.
current 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 current the page has been changed). Sysops also have a rollback link here, see Help:Reverting .
The grayed out and struck timestamp means the edit was revision deleted or suppressed by a sysop, and cannot be viewed publicly. It is possible to suppress the username and edit summary of the edit too, in which case they will also be grayed out with a strikethrough.
These are tags that were applied to the edit. These may be added automatically by the software (such as AbuseFilter ), or by the user. The default editor does not provide an interface for adding tags.

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.
The deletion or restoration (undeletion) of a page (if the user is a sysop). Use Special:Logs for this.

User styles

The page body has selector body.page-Special_Contributions, so we can e.g. use the CSS

body.page-Special_Contributions ul { list-style: decimal }

to number the backlinks.

URLs and links

URL with &_target parameter does not work on MobileFrontend.

A user contributions URL looks (for this wiki) like this:

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&_target=XX

or

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/XX

where XX is the user name, IP address, or IP range, and "Contributions" can be abbreviated to "Contribs":

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contribs&_target=XX

or

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Contribs/XX

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.

Interwiki links work as normal e.g. w:Special:Contributions/XX.

You can also view edits from one particular 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://www.mediawiki.org/w/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, if any, of the site you use; for meta: m:Privacy policy.

First edit

When using the user contributions feature to determine when a user started 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.

The page has as footer the MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer, the MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon for IP address, and MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon-range for IP ranges.

Note that, as described in phab:T50956, registered users don't see the content of this footer page if their language is different from the original language of the wiki.

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. Note that, as described in phab:T21311, this value may not be reliable.