Every article keeps a history. Each entry is a snapshot of the article after a change, stamped with who made it and when, so you can answer "who edited this, and what did it say before?" without keeping copies of your own.
You will find it in the History panel of the editor rail, directly under Status & lifecycle. Entries are listed newest first: the top one is the article as it stands now and is marked Current; the oldest is its creation.
Each entry says what kind of change it was:
| Entry | What happened |
|---|---|
| Created | The article was created. Every history starts here. |
| Edited | The title or body was saved. |
| Restored | An earlier version was restored. |
| Published / Unpublished | The article was made live, or pulled back to draft. |
| Archived / Unarchived | The article was retired, or brought back to draft. |
| Audience changed | Visibility or the company audience changed. |
A change that changes nothing is not recorded. Re-publishing an article that is already published, or saving the Audience panel without altering the selection, leaves no entry — history reports what actually happened, not what was clicked.
Each row shows the kind of change, who made it, and how long ago. The newest row carries the Current badge; every older row has a Preview button. If there is more history than fits, Load more fetches the next page.
If the history cannot be loaded — a network or server problem — the panel says so and offers Retry, and keeps showing whatever it already had. It never reports an empty history when it simply failed to fetch one. While the history may be out of date that way, the top row drops its Current badge and offers Preview instead, because the panel can no longer be sure it is the newest; a successful Retry puts the badge back.
Preview on any older row opens a full-screen dialog, giving longer articles room to read. It shows the change type, author, date, title, and a read-only copy of the body. Nothing has changed at this point — you are looking at a record, and closing the dialog leaves the article exactly as it was.
From the preview, Restore this version puts that version's content back.
A restore changes the title and body, and nothing else. Specifically it leaves alone:
Nothing is deleted. The restore is added as a new Restored entry at the top of the history, pointing at the version it came from. Everything that happened after that version is still listed — so a restore can itself be undone by restoring the entry just before it.
Viewing history needs nothing beyond the access that opens the article — if you can read it in the editor, you can read its history.
Restoring is an edit, so it needs exactly the same permission editing the article's content would:
| The article | To restore a version you need |
|---|---|
| Your own draft | Create knowledge-base articles |
| Your own published or archived article | Edit knowledge-base articles you authored, or Publish knowledge-base articles |
| Someone else's article | Edit any member's knowledge-base articles |
Without those, the preview opens read-only and offers no Restore. An article you are not allowed to see returns "not found" — and so does its history, for the same reason: an error that distinguished the two would confirm the article exists.
See Knowledge Base permissions for the full picture.
Existing articles already have a history. When this feature shipped, every article that already existed was given its Created entry, so no history starts empty.
An entry can be attributed to DevStride. Very occasionally an entry reads Changed outside history, attributed to DevStride rather than a person. That is a repair: the article was found to differ from its newest entry, so the content that was actually there was recorded rather than quietly dropped. It is normal immediately around a release and needs no action — the entry preserves what the article said at that moment.