User:Flominator/WikiBlame

This page describes the use and the idea of WikiBlame. Please post your questions here.

WikiBlame is a tool that is able to quickly find the authors of good, questionable or even dangerous (e.g., copyrighted) passages of an article. This could be handy for asking users about their contributions or in order to fulfill the demands of GFDL when copying parts

Location on history pages

Usage

The tool searches the version history of an article in order to find a certain character string. Versions that contain the searched string are marked with OOO, while versions lacking it show XXX. Skipped versions are identified by ???.

If there's no wikicode ([, ], {, } *, #, '', ''', ==, ====, <, >, |) present in your search-term, then it will search for plain text. If you want to search for interwikis for example, you have to use „[[es:articlename“ instead of „es:articlename“.

Settings

Versions to check

• Number of versions that will be checked.
  • Hint: If the number of versions found equals the number of versions to be checked, there probably will be more versions.
  • Hint: Checking a lot of versions using linear searching will take a lot of time, unless you use a reasonably large skip number
  • Hint: Binary searching is usually very fast as it doesn't individually check each version, so using a big number (even several thousand) for binary searches is usually a good idea.
  • URL parameter: limit=x, example

Always skip x versions

• After checking one revision WikiBlame skips x revisions before checking another revision. This only works when you're doing linear searches.

Ignore first x versions

• WikiBlame ignores the given number of revisions at the beginning of the revision history, before it starts searching.

Start date

• The search works backward from the Start date. Versions before 11:55 pm of this day will be included.
  • URL parameter:

Jan 25 2015 5:00 a.m

Force searching for wikitext

If activated, this option will treat the entered text as wiki text. This function is useful, e.g. if you want to search for a part of an external link.

Search method

• linear: check every version
  • URL parameter: &searchmethod=lin (default), example
• binary (recommended when there are lots of versions)
  • Hint: Should binary search find a version that was just reverted, begin again by using a starting time before
  • URL parameter: &searchmethod=int, example

Language

Meanwhile there are Wikimedia wikis, that have no language prefix in their URL. One of them is http://wikisource.org/ for example. If you want to search in one of these, enter blank in the language field.

• URL parameters:
  • project: project=, example
  • project subdomain: lang=, example
  • page to search: article=, example
  • string to search: needle=, example
  • interface language: user_lang=, example

Implementation

The tool works as follows: it creates a history of versions (like [1]). Its beginning and length are determined by the corresponding input fields. Now the links to the versions themselves are stored within an array. They are downloaded one after another and compared to the searched text.

Integration in English Wikipedia

Integration into revision history

Within en.wp WikiBlame is linked from the revision history page of every article.

Alternatives

• XTools Blame