History
An article's wording moves with the story, and sooner or later someone wants to know what it used to say. GMTales keeps that record: a revision of every publish that changes an article's text, the creating publish included.
Saving a draft is not a publish and leaves no revision; see Drafts and Publishing for the two ways to save. Each revision is kept until its author removes it, and the history of an article is the author's, like everything else they wrote.
An older revision is a record. To bring old wording back, copy it out of the revision into the article, save it as a draft, and publish when it reads the way you want. The one exception is the version the article currently reads as, which you can take back in a single action.
The revision log shows each save as a step from the one before it, and Compare measures an older version against the article as it stands today.
Viewing Revision History
Revisions, among the article's subpages, lists every revision newest first, with timestamps.
Each entry shows what that save changed relative to the revision before it, as a unified diff.
When a save replaced a line rather than adding or removing one, the two lines are paired and compared word by word, so only the changed words light up:
Only one thousand/six thousand are highlighted; the rest of the line stays faint.
Deleting a Revision
Sometimes a save publishes something that was not meant to be read. Fixing the article's text is not enough on its own, because the older wording is still in the log. The author of an article can delete an older revision of it. Nobody else can, whatever their role.
Each entry has a Delete beside its Compare button.
The entry leaves no marker behind. The revision below the gap then shows what changed since the revision before the one you removed, so the log reads as an unbroken sequence of saves.
Deleting removes the text from the site. Anyone who already read it still knows what it said.
Taking Back the Current Version
The version the article reads as now is labelled Take back rather than Delete. Taking it back removes it and puts the article back to the version before it. Use this when a save published something that should not have been published at all. The wording goes from the article and from the log in one action, so there is no window in which the article is fixed but the log still carries the mistake.
Everything that follows from a save follows from this too: the article's links are rebuilt against the restored wording, and the campaign sees the article change.
If the version you are taking back is the only one the article has, there is nothing to go back to, and taking it back fails without changing anything. Removing it would leave an article with no text at any version, which is deleting the article, and that is a separate decision you make on the article itself.
Comparing With the Current Version
The revision log answers "what did this save change?". To answer "how far has the article drifted since then?", click Compare on any revision. The article page reopens in comparison mode, measuring that revision against the current version rather than its neighbour.
The comparison is shown as rendered Markdown, not raw source. Both sides are rendered first and then compared, so the article still reads like an article while the changes are marked. Changed prose highlights inline, word by word, and a block that appeared or disappeared — a fact box, a secret, an image — is flagged as one unit instead of dissolving into line-by-line noise.
Above the body, a summary strip reports metadata that changed but has no place in the rendered text: the article type as old → new, and labels gained (green) and lost (red struck through). The strip is omitted when neither changed.
A draft is not a save, so it is not in the revision log. To see a draft against the published article, use the Compare link in the draft banner on the article or in the editor. That comparison puts the published version on the left and your draft on the right, so the changes you have not published yet read as additions.
Visibility in Revisions
Revision history respects visibility:
A reader outside gm sees only the public sentence in every revision, and the diff shows no change there. A gm member sees the secret block highlighted as added.
Filtering happens per viewer and per side: the old version and the current version are each reduced to what you may read before they are compared. Where a hidden passage sat between two visible ones, the gap is closed, so its absence can't be told from the spacing.