Last modified: 2014-04-22 08:49:35 UTC
Can Wikipedia have an option to search through all of a user's contributions to a particular article, for a specific string? For example, I know I've added the word "green" to the article on Vegetables, but I can't recall when, and what exactly was added. I see the search returning a list of diffs. The username would be optional, and the article/page would be optional.
What is the usecase?
Usecase? Sorry, what is meant by this?
Why would anybody do what is described in comment 0. The intention of it. :)
If I see a statement in a Wikipedia article, sometimes it is not sourced. So I'd like to find out who added it, so I can ask them whether they forgot the source, don't have one, of whatever. Or perhaps the statement is ambiguous, so it would nice to ask the editor for clarification. Or perhaps an editor is accused of always adding a certain phrase to an article over time (avoiding 3RR), but the search shows that they are doing it over a long period of time. Or perhaps I believe an editor making unwelcome comments about me, so I could search to find out what they have said about me. Or perhaps a Wikipedia core policy has changed, and we want find out when the wording was change from "always" to "sometimes".
Ian, if I understand correctly, part of the functionality you are looking for, is in the tool [[Wikipedia:WikiBlame]]. In the English Wikipedia, this tool is linked at the top of every History page, with the text "Revision history search". Some of the other scenarios ('use-cases') you describe, which I'd paraphrase-for-confirmation as "searching all contributions of a single editor (across many/all pages), for additions of a particular textstring", will need a new bug. I'd suggest closing this one, and starting a new one, with that description and your examples. (Include both the Abstract, and Specific :) HTH.
This isn't how search works. The search engine only cares about the latest version of pages.
