HistoryRewritten for Chrome
Version 0.2.1 on the Chrome Web Store · 0.3.0 packaged for the next store review · source
See how the Wikipedia article you are reading changed around a major event — an activity score against the article’s own history, one line under the title, and one click to the full evidence report.
What it does
- A chip under the article title. One line — for example “Typical activity · 12/100” — rendered under the heading of the article you are on. Click it to open the full report.
- A toolbar badge. A single letter per tab (T, E, H, V for typical, elevated, high, very high) so you can see the status without opening anything.
- A popup. The article title, the matched event (switchable per page), the score with its threshold scale, the top components, the caveat, and Open full report. Settings live here too.
- A deep link to the report. The full report on HistoryRewritten — interactive timeline, reconstructible score breakdown, and the on-demand before/after comparison with exact excerpts and the official Wikipedia diff.
The event is matched from the article’s own text: keywords in the title, visible categories, and lead paragraph are scored locally against four event presets (October 7, 2023 · the invasion of Ukraine · the ChatGPT release · the COVID-19 pandemic declaration). The badge and chip appear only for keyword-matched or user-chosen events, so an unrelated article never gets a verdict pinned to an arbitrary default. You can switch the event per page and choose your own default; the alert setting is Always, Only on high activity, or Never (results stay in the popup). Automatic matching currently reads English keywords; on other language editions, open the popup to analyze any article.
Activity is not proof of bias or misconduct. An edit spike can mean new sources, cleanup, disputes, or plain attention. Articles with thin history say “insufficient baseline” instead of pretending to a verdict, and the extension never profiles individual editors — aggregate statistics only.
Permissions
Exactly what the shipped manifest requests, and why:
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
storage | Saves your three settings (alert mode, whether the popup may open by itself on high activity, and default event) via Chrome sync storage, and caches per-tab analysis results — plus a per-tab marker that the popup already opened for the current article — in session storage for the current browsing session only. No browsing history or personal data is stored. |
Content script on https://*.wikipedia.org/wiki/* | The extension’s only host access. It detects that the current page is a Wikipedia article, reads the title, lead, and visible categories locally to suggest a relevant event, and renders the optional one-line chip under the title. No other sites are accessed, and page content is never transmitted. |
Not requested: tabs, activeTab, host permissions for the API (it allows the extension’s origin), or remote code — every script ships in the package; the extension fetches JSON data from the HistoryRewritten API and nothing executable.
Privacy model
- Keyword matching runs entirely in your browser. The lead text and categories it reads never leave your device.
- An article’s title (with its language edition and the event date — nothing else) is sent to the HistoryRewritten service only when the article matches a tracked event and alerts are enabled, or when you open the popup or pick an event for the page. In silent mode, nothing is sent until you open the popup.
- No browsing history, and nothing from non-Wikipedia pages. No accounts, no tracking.
- Your settings are stored with Chrome’s own sync storage, not on our servers; per-tab results live in session storage and are cleared when the tab navigates or closes.
Full policy: privacy. The service itself keeps no IP logs and returns aggregate editor statistics only.
Source and versions
The extension is hand-written Manifest V3 with no build step: extension/ in the repository is exactly what the store package contains. The package version (0.3.0) is read from that manifest; the store serves 0.2.1 until the next review completes. The store listing is at chromewebstore.google.com. HistoryRewritten is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; how the analysis works is on the methodology page.