How to Use Wikipedia As a Document Comparison Application
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
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Go to the Wikipedia Sandbox on the Wikipedia website.
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Click the "edit this page" tab
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Enter the content from one of the sources you wish to compare and click "Save page."
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Click the "edit this page" tab again
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Enter the content from the other source you wish to compare and click "Save page."
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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.
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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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