Timeline

Every document in Open Knowledge has a Timeline. It's the single surface that answers "what did this document used to look like?" — covering user-triggered Save Versions, per-writer work-in-progress commits, upstream git pull imports, and the automatic checkpoints the editor writes when a concurrent-edit race trips the CRDT's structural limit.

The panel lives next to the editor. Open it from the document header (the clock icon) or with the keyboard shortcut shown there.

Row types

Each row shows an author, a relative timestamp (e.g. "3 min ago"), and a kind-specific icon:

• Diamond — "Save Version". A user-triggered snapshot. Click to preview the state at that version; the Restore action writes that snapshot over the current document as a new edit.
• Amber alert-triangle — "Auto-saved before a concurrent edit (size)". The editor wrote this checkpoint automatically right before a concurrent-edit merge finalized. If you notice a paragraph blink or lost text, this is where it's preserved. See [[collaboration-recovery]] for the full flow.
• Sky file-archive — "Recovered from an external change (size)". An external writer (another process, a git checkout, a file-watcher sync) overrode an in-memory draft. The draft is preserved under this entry.
• Writer chip (bullet + color) — a per-writer WIP (work-in-progress) auto-commit. Individually noisy; the Timeline folds consecutive same-writer runs. When an agent provided a summary on its write, the row carries one bullet per summary underneath the author line — see "Agent summaries" below.
• Upstream arrow — a git pull or equivalent brought new content in from outside the editor.

Agent summaries

Agents writing through MCP (write_document, edit_document, rename_document, rollback_to_version) can attach a short summary describing the intent of the edit. Summaries appear as bulleted text under the author line on the WIP row — one bullet per summarized write, oldest first, capped at 80 characters each. The first bullet is always visible; additional bullets collapse behind a "Show N more" expander.

The doc list on the row (e.g. foo.md · bar.md) is still shown as ground truth: it lists every document the commit touched, regardless of whether each got a summary. Bullets enrich that list — they don't replace it.

Legacy commits, WYSIWYG edits, auto-saves, and rollbacks driven by the in-editor Restore button have no bullets. For rename and rollback calls made through MCP, the server fills in a default summary — Renamed <from> → <to> or Restored to <sha-short> — so those rows are self-describing even when the agent didn't provide one.

Restoring

Click any row to load it in read-only preview. From the preview you can:

1. Copy a specific paragraph or fragment back into the live document manually.
2. Restore the whole snapshot as a new edit on top of the current state.

Restores are always additive — the current state becomes the snapshot's state via a new CRDT edit, so the change itself lands in the Timeline as a new row. You can undo the restore like any other edit.

Retention

• Save Version checkpoints are retained indefinitely — they're the permanent history of your document.
• Auto-saved checkpoints (both kinds above) are retained at most 50 per kind per branch and 30 days, whichever is more generous. Older auto-saves garbage-collect themselves so the Timeline stays readable.
• Writer WIP commits are consolidated into the nearest Save Version as the branch progresses; orphaned WIP (branch deleted) is cleaned up after 24 hours.

See also

• [[collaboration-recovery]] — the user-facing walkthrough for the concurrent-edit recovery UX.
• [[architecture]] — the settlement-based observer bridge and the post-condition that drives the automatic checkpoints.