Does this exist ? Click on text in Wikipedia and see the creating edit.

February 20, 2023 3:12 PM

Is there a way of doing this ? I would like to click on a word on a Wikipedia page and get shown which edit created that word. As far as I know the only way to achieve this is to look in the history and systematically work my way back through time ... not an appealing prospect !
posted by southof40 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: It's not something that exists natively in Wikipedia. However, while you can't click on a word, there's the external tool WikiBlame which lets you search for edit content. See the manual for instructions.
posted by zamboni at 3:21 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yep can concur with zamboni that this is not something that exists natively. If I need to track down a single word in an edit I'll sometimes do "split the difference" where I'll go back a certain number of edits, see if the word is there and, if not, split the remaining edits in half etc. This is something I would find practical and I'm now going to look into WikiBlame!
posted by jessamyn at 4:37 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think the Who Wrote That? add-on will do what you want.
posted by paduasoy at 4:47 PM on February 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

"split the difference" where I'll go back a certain number of edits, see if the word is there and, if not, split the remaining edits in half etc.

It looks like this is exactly what WikiBlame’s binary mode does...
posted by staggernation at 5:37 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Some excellent answers, thank you.
posted by southof40 at 5:11 PM on February 22, 2023