How can I find out who wrote a certain section of an article in Wikipedia?

Question

Version control systems typically call this feature "blaming someone". For each line, it shows you who modified it and when.

Update: I'm looking for a solution for articles with thousands of edits as well (i.e. navigating the version history and checking each one is not practical).

Answer 1

If you click the View History link for an article you can see the list of changes made to the article, on what date, and by whom. A short summary of the change description is also displayed. You can then click the Compare selected version button to compare text.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a Blame feature that lets you directly see who made the changes to a particular line or sentence or paragraph.

EDIT: You may want to check out Greg Hewill's site, he (apparently) is working on just such a blame feature.

Answer 2

Use http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php?lang=en which allows searching of revisions on Wikipedia.

Answer 3

One way to do it is to export the article history, and then process the revisions using a local tool like git blame. This could be done using a script.

To export the article history, use Special:Export, specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Export&history=1&action=submit&pages=Blinkenlights.

To generate the blame, first add the revisions to a temporary git repository (shown in Python 3):

import tempfile
import subprocess
with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as repo:
    os.chdir(repo.name)
    subprocess.check_call(['git', 'init'])

Then download the exported history XML, parse it with something like lxml.etree, and loop over the revisions (xpath //revision). For each revision, write the text to a file (say article.wiki), read the author, and run

subprocess.check_call(['git', 'commit', '-a', '-m', 'blah', '--author=' + str(author)])

After all revisions are added to the repo, run git blame article.wiki to see the author of each line.

Note: Special:Export might restrict the number of revisions exported, so in pages with long history you might have to fetch the XML multiple times.

Answer 4

You can do this by clicking "View History" located in the upper right corner of every wikipedia article. There you will find a list of the revisions of an article. If you want to specifically was committed by each user, you can click "cur" next to each revision and wikipedia will highlight what was changed.

Answer 5

• The Who Wrote That? Chrome extension is the best/easiest tool for finding who wrote the latest revision of visible text.
• Alternatively, you can look up Authorship percentages in XTools for a general sense of who "wrote" the current article. Both this and Who Wrote That? are powered by wikiwho.
• WikiBlame is clunky and more for power-editors but will hunt for the diff of when text was added or removed. Just need to enter the page name and the specific search text.