Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Who did what: Page histories and reverting

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Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Most of the time that's a good thing—millions of people have made positive contributions to the largest group-writing effort in human history. Then there are the problem children: those who can't resist the urge to deface an article, or delete all its content (a practice known as blanking a page), and those who add incorrect information, deliberately or by mistake. Fortunately, Wikipedia has robust change-tracking built into it: Whatever one editor does, another can reverse, returning an article to precisely what it was before.

Apart from vandalism, as an editor you're likely to want to see what other editors do to articles you've edited, whether they're on your watchlist (see the section about your watchlist) or not. While Wikipedia's change-tracking system isn't hard to understand, you'll probably find it isn't totally intuitive. In this chapter you'll learn how to quickly read through even a convoluted page history, how to see what's happened since you last edited an article, how to restore an earlier version of an article with just a few clicks, and how to deal with a problem edit followed by other edits you don't want to delete.