Wikipedia:Complete diff and link guide

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 This page is a how-to guide detailing a practice or process on the English Wikipedia.
The 3-tier diff and link series

Wikipedia:Simplest diff guide
Wikipedia:Simple diff and link guide
Wikipedia:Complete diff and link guide
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[edit] Why use diffs and links?

If you contribute an argument to a page like requests for comment, requests for arbitration, the community sanction noticeboard, or the incidents noticeboard for administrative attention, it's essential to give evidence for your claims in the form of diffs and/or other links. Without such evidence, you will be taken less seriously. If you simply claim that "editor X has posted several personal attacks on talkpages" or "editor Y is edit warring on George W. Bush", you may be ignored, or told "diffs or it didn't happen".

The most useful evidence consists of diffs to individual edits and links to page sections. Avoid linking to entire talkpages, as they are too long and diverse to be helpful. Linking to parts of a page history or an editor's contributions can be done, but is a bit complicated; see Timestamp limits below.

[edit] How to harvest a diff

Find the page which contains the edit you want to refer to. Click on its history tab. Find the edit in the history list. (If that's a problem, clicking on the word last in the list will let you read the edit.) Right-click on its "last" button and select "Copy link location". The diff you want is now in your clipboard.

[edit] How to harvest a page section link

Find the page which contains the section you want to refer to. Click on "Permanent link" in the "Toolbox" in the lefthand sidebar. Go to the page's Table of Contents. Right-click on the name of the section you want to use, where it appears in the Table of Contents, and select "Copy link location". The section link you want is now in your clipboard.

[edit] How to link to a log

Logs are subject to change, but a form of permanency can be achieved by specifying the time span over which one inquires. For example, by adding &from=time&until=time, where time has the format of YearMonthDayHoursMinutesSeconds. (Note, this time and date reflects the UTC server time).

[edit] Timestamp limits

More complicated linking can be achieved using timestamps in the linking URLs. These take the form YYYYMMDDhhmmss, where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, DD is the day, hh is the hour, mm is the minutes and ss is the seconds. For example, 20070814233520 is 23:35:20 on 14th August 2007. This allows specific linking to parts of a contributions list or a page or user log, as shown above. One use of these timestamps is to link to a specific range of edits by a user.

To link to a range of sequential edits by a user, find the date and time of the last edit and generate a timestamp as above. Then set the limit to the number of edits required. The results will change if any of the edits are deleted (eg. if one of the articles that was edited gets deleted). An example of this is:

[edit] How to put diffs and links into your text

Diffs links are formatted in the same way as external links (see Wikipedia:How to edit a page#Links and URLs):

  1. Diffs and links will work if they're simply pasted into your text like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/InShaneee/Workshop&diff=next&oldid=115703696.
  2. Or you can make them neater by putting single (not double) square brackets round them. Typing this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/InShaneee/Workshop&diff=next&oldid=115703696] will give a note like this:[1].
  3. Or you can make them elegant by wrapping them into a word in your text. Typing this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/InShaneee/Workshop&diff=next&oldid=115703696 this] will give this link. Notice the space between the link and the wrapper word.

The http:// must always be used for diff links and permalinks (there is no way to express them as wikilinks). However, the page name after the "title=" part only serves to make the URL more readable - it can be left out, or even manipulated without affecting the target of the link. (For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Good&oldid=191637801 actually points to a version of the article Evil.) This has occasionally been abused to deceive casual readers.

Also, be aware that diff links can also be created between non-consecutive versions (see Help:Page history). Thus, a diff link might show the changes from several users at once, but only one of them will displayed on the right hand side. It is even possible to create diff links which compare versions of different pages. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=179085783&oldid=179088483 compares a version of Phillips, Nebraska with a version of Hordville, Nebraska. This can be used to highlight copy and paste actions.

[edit] See also