Access to item changes history?

[wojtek]

We have nice “Content update” category but! sometimes item changes and searching for changes related to it is a bit cumbersome.

Would it be possible to add “item changes history” as a view/link to each item? this way if someone remembers some mnemonic and then there is another one - one could check the history of changes easily (thing “git history” )

( @JenK ?)

[wojtek]

Also, would it be possible to add different reading as synonym (so one could stick with on’yomi)?

[TofuguKyle]

Thanks for the feedback @wojtek . I’ll pass it along to the team for consideration.

[wojtek]

@TofuguKyle

Thanks for the feedback @wojtek . I’ll pass it along to the team for consideration.

Were there any talks/mention of it with the team?

(also, slight bump to avoid closing the topic automatically… would be lovely to mark it as do-not-close automatically…)

[wojtek]

Cross-linking to the relevant suggestion:

@wojtek

Also, it would be awesome to incorporate content changes as “item history” with what the change was, when it was and the previous mnemonics. It should’t take too much space (storage wise) but would be super helpful.

For the lack of better example, this is from the the XMPP extensions:

XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe

you can see “revision history” with simple notes what was changed and why. Having something similar in the particular item would be awesome.

For example 明 page could have at the bottom (possibly collapsed by default?) "Change history) which would list all changes like:

• 2025-09-30: Changed the primary reading from めい to あ, changed the radical components from “sun” and “moon” to “bright,” updated the meaning mnemonic and hint, and updated the reading mnemonic and hint. (thread: Thursday October 30 2025 Content Updates)

[max_kanji]

Hi @TofuguKyle ,

I’m curious as well if there are any progress about this issue (item change history)?
We had same discussion in another thread, that it’ll be really useful for the users.

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Are there any ways to see the old mnemonics? I have one big complaint — that changing mnemonics really affects the study. When you are using WaniKani for studying over a long period of time (1–2 years), you’ve already gotten used to that mnemonic for すう being “sue”. And suddenly it changed to “soup”. You forgot the reading for one kanji, and you are not able to recall it correctly — because the mnemonic changed. If you want to start associating it with “soup”, you need to re-study other kanji…

[TofuguKyle]

Hi @max_kanji , no we don’t have any updates here. We’ll be sure to update the community if we ever build that feature!

[wojtek]

@TofuguKyle

no we don’t have any updates here. We’ll be sure to update the community if we ever build that feature!

I do hope, and keep fingers crossed, that it will happen one day

[ricardo1]

x-posting for vis:

I’ve started tracking WaniKani content changes on Wanilog: https://wanilog.com/content-updates

I’ve backfilled the Content Updates forum posts. Starting today, 20 September, I’m also taking daily snapshots of the WaniKani API to record specific changes, such as old → new mnemonics, readings and meanings.

Item pages now have a “Content history” box showing recorded changes to that item:

The forum archive provides historical descriptions, but usually not the exact previous wording. For changes detected from today onward, Wanilog can show the before-and-after values.

[wojtek]

@ricardo1

I’ve backfilled the Content Updates forum posts. Starting today, 20 September, I’m also taking daily snapshots of the WaniKani API to record specific changes, such as old → new mnemonics, readings and meanings.

OMG! This is beyond brilliant!!!

I do wonder - WK should have historical versions available? And there are maybe accounts from before The Great Update (where you had to opt-in to use the new mnemonics) that should probably give access to older variants and someone could probably help with back-filling?

[ricardo1]

If you could point me in the right direction, I would be more than happy to take a look at backfilling this data!

edit: this looks promising → GitHub - tofugu/wanikani-deprecated-content: Old content from WaniKani prior to the 2019 content change · GitHub

[wojtek]

uhm… it was way way more ago than I remembered: Update on the Old Mnemonics

but yeah, this github repository is a goldmine and should be a great starting point.

And then diffing from API on each content update should give a history.

Still a bit of a bummer that it’s not available directly through the API itself and instead users have to collect it

[max_kanji]

Wow, your tool is just amazing!

Like, honestly, was shocked. Great job!