How to Use Wikipedia As a Document Comparison Application

Опубликовал Admin
1-02-2017, 06:54
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Need a quick and cheap way to compare the contents of two documents? Document comparison software can be a bit expensive for features that may not be used on a day-to-day basis. This tutorial will show you how to take advantage of the "history" feature found on Wikipedia, the largest user-contributed reference Web site on the Internet, to find even the smallest changes in two or more documents.

Steps

  1. Go to the Wikipedia Sandbox on the Wikipedia website.
  2. Click the "edit this page" tab
  3. Enter the content from one of the sources you wish to compare and click "Save page."
  4. Click the "edit this page" tab again
  5. Enter the content from the other source you wish to compare and click "Save page."
  6. Click the "history" tab. Unless someone has been editing at the same time, you should be able to simply click the "Compare selected versions" button; otherwise you must first select the radio buttons representing your latest edits, then click the "Compare" button.
  7. The ensuing screen will show you the differences between the two documents.

Tips

  • To compare more than one document, simply repeat these steps for each version you wish to compare.
  • For best results, the documents should be known to be somewhat similar. Comparing two totally different documents, say one about fishing and a financial report, will yield the obvious: These are two totally different documents, but you knew that, right?

Warnings

  • Do not compare documents that contain sensitive or private materials - once you have posted your content to Wikipedia it is there for good, for all to see.
    • Unless it is your own user subpage and you submit it for speedy deletion.
  • This method can only be used for comparing content , not the layout, design, or styles within a document.
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