Daniel Kinzler wrote:
The Memento Project <http://www.mementoweb.org/>
(including the Los Alamos
National Laboratory (!) featuring Herbert Van de Sompel of OpenURL fame) is
proposing a new HTTP header, X-Accept-Datetime, to fetch old versions of a web
resource. They already wrote a MediaWiki extension for this
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento> - which would of course be
particularly interesting for use on Wikipedia.
Do you think we could have this for Wikimedia project? I think that would be
very nice indeed. I recall that ways to look at last weeks main page have been
discussed before, and I see several issues:
* the timestamp isn't a unique identifier, multiple revisions *might* have the
same timestamp. We need a tiebreak (rev_id would be the obvious choice).
I'd say it is, if sufficiently precise :) If not, either use the
lowest/highest rev_id, or the user could be asked to choose a version.
* templates and images also need to be "time
warped". It seems like the
extension does not address this at the moment. For flagged revisions we do have
such a machnism, right? Could that be used here?
I see three independent things here:
1) When viewing a past version of a page, show appropriate templates,
images, magic words etc.
2) When viewing a past version of a page, link to other pages as
appropriate (show red links if they haven't yet existed, link to their
appropriate past version if they have). I'd say this is the easiest to
implement, and the most interesting for readers.
3) Ability to view a page as it looked at a certain time (as opposed to
a certain revision).