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On a number of occasions I have stumbled upon edits to my posts (by others) that needed revision or rollback, e.g. because the author misunderstood my intent. These were discovered by chance, since there does not seem to be any automatic notification regarding edits to one's own posts. Is there any way to get notifications of such edits, or is there any way to easily track such edits? Perhaps, lacking any other solution, this can be achieved via Data Explorer SQL queries? Is any reader proficient enough with DE to compose such a query?

I think this is an important capability, since the author of the post is usually in the best position to judge the correctness of edits. It seems quite strange that the author receives no explicit notification of edits.

Edit $\ $ There is a list of revisions to one's posts that is maintained by the software (see the answers), so the only question that remains is: why revisions don't yield notifications (similar to comments), so one doesn't need to explicitly poll for them? It's not clear to me why the software doesn't provide such notifications. Any idea why? For example, the inbox notification could count both comments and revisions (combined or separately) without adding much noise (since currently revisions seem to be rare, even though the software model encourages such).

And perhaps we should (carefully) revise more, because burying insightful mathematical remarks in second-class objects like comments is non-optimal given the software design; e.g. comments are not searchable, so a remark such as "this is a special case of the beautiful theory of xyz, see this award-winning exposition by Lenstra" will not be found by users searching on xyz via the SE software. Note: Google does appear to index (some, but not all?) comments, as a quick test searching via Google with and without site:math.stackexchange.com. That implies that generic Google searches may lead offsite folks to useful comments here, even if the SE software doesn't (based on my experience, it appears that Google page ranking of math.SE is quite high, so matches on math.SE probably display near the top of most Google searches - something worth keeping in mind when composing answers here).

Perhaps if there were such revision notifications, folks would be more comfortable with the idea of others editing their posts (wiki-style), and the site would be richer, since it is usually far less effort to incrementally revise an answer than to compose a new answer from scratch.

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  • $\begingroup$ +1. Very nice question. $\endgroup$
    – user21436
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 16:41

2 Answers 2

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Profile -> Responses -> Revisions would give you a list of revisions done to your posts.

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  • $\begingroup$ +1. Thank you. I never knew some people have edited my posts. Sometimes, some chat users edit and they tell me. That notifies me, but some of them went unnotified too. Nice answer. $\endgroup$
    – user21436
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 16:41
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A slight shortcut to Aryhabhata's answer (two clicks instead of 3): if you click on the arrow to the left of your name at the top of the pages, the drop-down menu includes a line "Revisions", with daily, weekly, and monthly totals. Clicking on "Revisions" will take you to that same page. You can also see whether there have been any revisions there.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks. I never use that popup (no useful info there), but go straight to my user page. There "revisions" is hidden under responses, so I never noticed it (I track responses through the inbox notifications). Still it would be nice if one didn't explicitly need to poll for revisions, e.g. if they were including in the inbox notifications. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 18:28
  • $\begingroup$ @Bill: My (uncorroborated) impression is that I would get a notification (i.e., the red-bordered number) if someone revises, though it does not appear listed explicitly. Maybe you've seen what appears to be "phantom responses", where the system tells you you have some responses and then you don't see any listed? I have, and I think they are revisions... $\endgroup$
    – Arturo Magidin
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 18:42
  • $\begingroup$ Interesting. Could you please revise one of my posts so we can test it? $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 18:54
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the test. It's now 11 minutes since your revision and, alas, I have no inbox notifications. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 19:10
  • $\begingroup$ @Bill: Then I was wrong about the phantom notifications. Sorry for the misinformation. $\endgroup$
    – Arturo Magidin
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 19:18
  • $\begingroup$ Perhaps it worked the way you described in the past, but has since been changed. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 19:26
  • $\begingroup$ Great, I didn't know about this -- just checked my revisions and was pleased to find they were a) fewer than I expected and b) all improvements except for one that I'd already reverted at the time :-) $\endgroup$
    – joriki
    Commented Aug 11, 2012 at 8:05

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