How do I look at a Wikipedia page as it was, say, 6 months ago?

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? Best Answer

  • Click on the “View history” tab at the top of the page. This will show you a list of previous revisions of the page, sorted chronologically. Each revision entry contains a great deal of information:

    • “cur” and “prev” links to see the differences between that revision and either the current revision or the preceding revision, respectively
    • A timestamp, which provides a permanent link to that revision of the page
    • The username of the editor who made that change (and links for their user talk pages and contributions)
    • Markers on the edit: “m” for minor edits, “b” for bot edits, etc.
    • The number of bytes in the article source text (roughly equal to the number of characters, but some special or accented characters are two bytes long)
    • The number of bytes added or removed in that edit
    • A summary of the edit, if given by the user who made it (or generated automatically for some actions)
    • Links to quickly manually undo the changes in selected revisions

    Most of this you won’t need. Look at the timestamps, and go down the list to the newest revision before the point in time you want to see. Click on the timestamp and you’ll see the article as generated currently from the source text from then.

    Keep in mind that some Wikipedia articles use “templates” that are transcluded (< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusi… >) onto them, and the *current version* of these templates will be rendered with the old source of the page—there may be inconsistencies, broken code, et cetera if those templates have been updated or deleted since.

    Some templates can also use dynamic elements like the current date and time: they update the page automatically each time the page is re-rendered from the source. A good example is the template “birth date and age”, which automatically produces a living person’s current age given only their birthdate. An old version of a page using this template would still display the person’s current age.
    – Chosen by Asker

  • That is almost impossible as Wikipedia always update at least once a week to avoid outdated information in their site. If you save the pages of 6 months ago that might be possible.

  • Webarchive has this option for you. Using this website you can revisit any website at any previous instances.

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