Can we get an annotated version of a profile to show who last changed each line?

Question

I often would like to know for a line in a profile, where did it get introduced.  Right now, the history of changes only allows you to step through and see each change in isolation, there is no way (that I've found) to view the status of a profile as of a given date.  This would be helpful to divide and conquer the changes to track down the source of a change as the search becomes O(log(n)) instead of O(n) on the number of changes when you can pick a mid-point and decide whether the change is before or after.

It would be nice if the history of a profile permitted one to view the whole state of the profile as of a given date like one can do on Wikipedia.org.

Even better, would be a tool to annotate the latest version of a profile and show for each line the version at which it was last touched.

This would be analogous to GitHub where there is a Blame tool for doing this.

Can the idea of a annotate changes and a view status as of a version be added to our development roadmap?

Answer 1

William, there is a alternative history view that will do what I think you are looking for. It's just not nearly as easy to access.

Go to https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Page-ID&action=history to see a history for any page (profile, free-space page, or category). Use the radio buttons on that page to select any two versions of the page history and compare them -- that will show you the net effect of edits made between those two versions.

An easy way to get to that URL is to open the edit mode for the page of interest and change word "edit" at the end of the URL to "history".

Comments

Ellen that is a very good  answer and I hope it is selected for best answer. But there are people, me for example that knowing how to do this is important but  have no idea what you said and I tried it and it did not work for me. I try to learn what I can but some information such as this just goes over my head. Would you please say that in English please? Thanks.

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Hi Jerry.  I just tried what she said and it worked.  I will paraphrase.

For any profile that you want to see the changes, you can compare two versions of the page to see the changes.  It gives you the change and who made the change.  

So go into the Edit tab as if you want to make changes.

Now go up to the address bar and move to the end.  Back over the word "edit" and replace it with "history" and hit enter.

This brings you to the history page where you can select any two versions to compare.

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Perhaps Ellen should have posted the URL as plain text (sometimes simpler us is better!) and used WikiTreeID instead of Page-ID:

www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=WikiTreeID&action=history

Copy the highlighted link and replace the bold text with the relevant WikiTreeID.

Let us know if that is the functionality you are seeking, William!

Let us know if this link works for you, too, Jerry!!

edit: Apparently the system won't let us post the link as plain text - trying to adjust it.

edit 2: Success - just omit the https:// part when posting a link as plain text in g2g. The world is now much wiser!!

edit 3: fixed a typo - Doh!!

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Thanks for the tip, Ellen; works like a charm - for me, anyway!

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Ellen di fine in her description. It is just my brain goes on strike once in a while and thank you Lindy for your help. Lucy you are the best. thank you for taking your time with me and it worked. This is actually no big deal. Just someone made a mistake on a Bio and I do not have to fix it. So I hope tis person has the time to work on it for me. Thanks everybody. the three of you have been a great big help. Everyone over my house for homemade blueberry ice cream.

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Great, can we expose this in the published web interface so it is discoverable?