Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>One possible solution would be to provide a way of citing articles as of
>a particular timestamp, for instance:
>
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134
>
>which would pull up either a cur or old version with that timestamp.
>(It could also be prettified: version=2003-02-24-16:11:34 etc)
>
>Advantages:
>* consistent, no fuss, no worries about rearrangement of db structure
>* citation URL can be provided in a nice handy link at the bottom of
>every page
>
>Disadvantages:
>* timestamp has 1-second resolution. Generally this is going to be
>unique (at least per article), but it may occasionally not be,
>particularly in cases of recombined histories. Some articles had
>multiple revisions' timestamps set to the same time due to bugs in the
>rename code and other db tweaks in early '02.
>* for this reason it's not suitable as the mainline url for drawing up
>old history revisions via the history list; so people have to remember
>to find and use the citation url separately
>
>Alternatively, we could supply _both_ timestamp and oldid in the URL,
>and let timestamp have priority if an exact match on both is not found.
>
>
Well, we could also have
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?md5=1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120
which would identify a unique version with high probability, and also provide a way of
verifying the integrity of the old version (otherwise, you're just trusting the owner
of the archive). For fanatical levels of caution, you could do:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134&md5=1234f53…
For the truly paranoid, you could substitute SHA-1 for MD5.
Perhaps we need a "permalink" at the bottom of this page marked
"permanent link to this version"?
-- Neil