After you edit a Wikipedia article, other editors may, in turn, change the changes you’ve made. As one of the notes at the bottom of the standard edit screen says, “If you don’t want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.” Edited mercilessly doesn’t necessarily mean your words will be ripped apart, but they could be. Once you’ve submitted work to Wikipedia, it’s fair game.
Rather than completely abandoning your edit to its fate, you probably want to check in and see how it’s faring. Most experienced editors monitor articles they’ve edited, both to make sure other editors treat their edits reasonably, and to learn from what other editors do. This chapter will show you a number of ways to watch articles for changes, whether or not you’ve edited them.
When you’re starting out, Wikipedia’s list of your edits—your User contributions page—is a handy way to monitor changes to pages you’ve edited. You get to that list by clicking the “my contributions” link near the upper-right corner of your screen (assuming you’re logged in). You’ll see something like Figure 6-1.
Figure 6-1. On the User contributions page, if you’ve done the most recent edit of an article, you’ll see “top”, in bold, at the end of its row. Here you see five edits for five different pages. Only the last page has been edited subsequently by another editor, as indicated by the lack of the word “top” at the end of that row.
Tip
If Figure 6-1 looks confusing, take a look back at Chapter 5. The User contributions page has a lot in common with page histories discussed in that chapter, though it lists only your edits.
The key to using your User contributions page as a monitoring tool is the word “top” that appears at the end of an edit. Whenever you see that, you know that you were the last to edit the article, so you don’t need to worry that it’s been vandalized, and you don’t have to look at it to see what constructive changes other editors may have made. If the “top” is missing from an edit, then you can click the “hist” link to go to the article and see edits made since the edit you were looking at.
However, using your User contributions page for monitoring changes has some limitations:
If you’ve edited a particular article multiple times, only the most recent edit has “top” as part of the row. That means you have to keep a sort of mental running tally of “tops” as you read down your list, so that when you come across the same article a second (or third or fourth) time, you don’t think the absence of “top” means someone else has been there last. (For example, in Figure 6-1, the page Talk:Sam Wyly was edited twice, but “top” appears only once, after the last edit.)
There isn’t any way to tell when you’ve already checked on changes by others. Suppose you last looked at your User contributions page on October 21. At that time, if there was no “top” after the Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts entry, you probably would have checked the page history to see what happened. Are you wasting your time by checking again now? (In short, this becomes a memory test, and even if your memory is close to perfect, you can still end up wasting time.)
Still, sometimes your User contributions page is useful as a tracking device. For example, if you’ve done single edits to a bunch of articles, then no editing for two days, and now want to see what’s happened to those articles, the User contributions page shows you which articles you need to check. (See the box on The User Contributions Page for a tip on making the page more readable.) But if you’re like most active editors, you want something that monitors changes more closely, like a watchlist, described next.