Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-14250-20191127235050

In some cases, people will be tagging pages on a wiki with a category for months, even YEARS before someone actually creates an official page for the category to organize it under a tree structure.

Although this information is buried somewhere within the edit history of articles, I'm wondering if anyone can think of an easy way to (automated) put together a timeline of when categories were added to pages, including preceding the date of the category's page creation.

In some cases a person who makes the page for the category is given credit for thinking up the category when that isn't actually true, they may simply notice it was already tagged on dozens of pages and then created the page for the category to organize it under the structure.

So I'd like to know if there's a way to find who actually first started tagging pages with a particular category. Is there some way to search the sourcecode diffs of user histories or page histories to find this out?

In some cases, it's a lot of work manually going through every edit diff for a page (especially without informative summaries, as many neglect) to figure out who added a category and when they did it.

Is software somehow able to dig through that and recognize category additions and return some kind of report on the times/users who added them, either for the wiki as a whole or narrowed down to particular articles? 