User blog comment:RRabbit42/The other side of the coin/@comment-5590118-20150101055752/@comment-961279-20150101173821

Actually, what I mean by the Recent Changes being consolidated is that triangle you can click on to expand the rest of the edits that have been on that one page. For example, let's say there was an edit at 01:47 on a page for Charlie Brown and the next it was at 23:09 on the same day, both of those will be next to each other, even if there were dozens of other edits on different pages in between.

Most of the other wikis I've seen don't group changes together like that. If you have 50 edits on other pages in between the ones at 01:47 and at 23:09, you've got 52 individual entries in the Recent Changes list. On a really big and really active wiki, you can have dozens or hundreds of edits per hour, or in the case of Wikipedia, per minute.

Unless you've got a page on your watchlist or you're constantly refreshing the Recent Changes, it's easy miss an instance of vandalism because it's pushed out of the list by newer edits coming in.

That's why I say it's useful. If you see two different people have edited the same page and the result is zero change, then you can quickly check to see if an edit war is going on or maybe the second one undid the first edit due to vandalism. It's harder to see that when there are separate entries in the Recent Changes.