Help:User contributions

"User contributions" provides help for editing and/or navigating SourceWatch. For more help see all SourceWatch help pages

SourceWatch Help

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User contributions pages list the edits that a particular user has made. These pages are specific to SourceWatch (and its hosted projects, like Congresspedia), so a user contributions page here will not show the edits a user has made to Wikipedia or any other wiki.

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.

Accessing a user contributions page

Accessing your own user contributions page

• To access your own user contributions page, click My contributions. This is displayed at the top of each page (assuming you are logged in), on the right hand side.

Accessing other user's user contributions page

To access another user's user contributions page you can either:

• Bring up the user page and click User contributions (on the left hand sidebar under "Toolbox"); or
• Go to Recent Changes or Page History, and click on the timestamp of an edit by the user for whom you are seeking a contribution list. This will bring up, in small text near the top of the page, a link entitled "contribs". Click the link and the user's contributions will come up.

URLs and links

A user contributions URL looks like this: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/XX where XX is the user name or IP address.

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 SourceWatch: 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, and later the page was imported.

Also, until 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.