Wikipedia:WikiBlame

WikiBlame
Developer	flominator
Written in	PHP
Platform	Cross-platform
License	GPL
Website	blame.toolforge.org/wikiblame.php
Repository	github.com/FlominatorTM/wikiblame

WikiBlame is an online browser-based tool for searching the revision history of a MediaWiki-based wiki for a text string to identify the author, date and time of a particular change to the page.

WikiBlame is available on each page by selecting "View history" → "Find addition/removal".

Features

• search the revision history of a wiki article for a plain text string
• search based on simple wiki markup such as links, section headings and templates
• linear search or binary search
• option to specify a start date for the search

Applications

• Establish when and by whom vandalism, copyright violations or promotional material was added to an article. This allows users to see whether the problematic editor made other undetected changes at the same time.
• Find out who added a quotation without an inline citation. If the editor is still active, the editor can be asked if they remember where the quote was read, so that an inline citation can be added to the article.
  • Similarly, it can be used to find an editor who added a short citation without adding the corresponding long citation to a references section. This is a fairly common mistake which is made when editors copy text from one article to another. If the editor is still active, they can be contacted to ask whence the copy came, or the text found by WikiBlame can be searched for in other Wikipedia articles to see if the long citation is available in another article.
• Fix this type of error (that occurs when someone deletes the original reference which is still used by its name somewhere else in an article) by searching for the name of the reference; e.g. name=Oxford:

Cite error: The named reference Oxford was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

• Find the author of an unsigned entry on a talk page so that the editor can be attributed (see WP:TALK § Attributing unsigned comments).

Project support

WikiBlame supports Wikipedia and other wikiprojects, including those without a language prefix.

Language support

WikiBlame has been translated into a number of European languages including English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Polish and Portuguese.

Optional: Add link to Tools menu

If you would like to add a link to WikiBlame to the Tools menu, so you have only one click to get to WikiBlame from any page, you can perform the following steps:

1. Open your common.js in edit mode (alternatively, go to your user page and append "/common.js" to the end of the URL and open the page in edit mode).
   • If you prefer to load this only on a specific skin, such as monobook, open your monobook.js in edit mode.
2. Copy the following code onto the JavaScript page you have chosen in the previous step:

   // Add WikiBlame launcher to the Tools menu
   $(function () {
    mw.util.addPortletLink(
     "p-tb",     // toolbox portlet
     "http://ramselehof.de/wikipedia/wikiblame.php?user_lang=en&lang=" + mw.config.get('wgContentLanguage')
     + "&project=wikipedia&article=" + mw.config.get('wgPageName')
     + "&needle=&skipversions=0&ignorefirst=0&limit=500&searchmethod=int&order=desc&user=",
     "WikiBlame"  // link label
   )});
   

3. Save the page and (re-)load it – refresh the cache by following the instructions at the top of your JavaScript page.

See also

• WikiBlame manual
• Who Wrote That?
• Blame tool in the XTools suite
• User:Daniel Quinlan/Scripts/Blame

Userbox

This user uses WikiBlame.

You can add the above userbox to your user page by adding to your page's wiki markup text the following template:

{{User:Was a bee/WikiBlame}}

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikipedia tools.

MediaWiki has documentation related to: Who Wrote That?

• WikiBlame site
• GitHub project page
• Alternative searcher on the Wikimedia Cloud Services server (less accurate)