+985 ?
 

I'm sure this has been explained before but it's 12:30 here in Chicago and I just did a page so I don't feel like looking
Anyway, what do those little number mean when you click on the 'Recent Changes' tab. Like this...

The Suffering: Ties That Bind‎; 06:04 . . (+985) . . BeardedHoplite (Talk | contribs)

Just curious.

+985 bytes or bits of data?

You added 985 characters of data from the last version stored. So you either typed in a sentence or paragraph 985 characters long or you added wiki code (like images & stuff) that equaled 985 additional characters to the body of the page.

When you make a change, like a mispelling "TANKRE" and spell it correctly "TANKER" the change will be "0" since you did not ADD nor subtract any characters from the page.

Changing the pixel width of a pic from "500px" to "600px" yields the same result.

And obviously when you delete stuff, the number will be NEGATIVE. When I see new or anonymous members making a large Positive or negative change in character count, I IMMEDIATELY go to that page and see (in the page history) what exactly they did. A huge negative number usually means some jerkoff is trying to mass delete stuff on the page for giggles. That has happened too many times to count.