Wikipedia:Tip of the day/March 18

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Breaking the 500-edit limit in "View History"

Have you ever been frustrated that you are limited to viewing 500-edits in View-History for pages?

Solution to see more edits:

  1. On any page with more than 500 edits...
  2. Click on that page's "View History" tab
  3. Click on the "|50)" wikilink just above and to the right of Compare selected versions
  4. Go up to your web browser's address bar and change limit=50 in the URL to any higher number (N) up to 5000, for example: limit=2500
  5. Press ↵ Enter or hit "go"

Go slow with "N", until you know what your web browser and computer can handle. If you get greedy your computer and browser may lock up. After the page fully loads you can use your browser's search feature to find what you are looking for or you can scroll down the page. As a bonus, your "next" choice will now offer next-N instead of next-500.

Bonus tip #1: The same process works in "Contributions", and on the search results page.
Bonus tip #2: If you prefer, you can tweak the web address (URL) on a view history page to go back from a specified date, which is useful for looking way back in long histories. In your browser in the URL after "&action=history" add "&offset=YYYYMMDD", where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, and DD is the day. Then press ↵ Enter or hit "go".

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