Ilya N. Golubev wrote:
History pages do not (obviously) refer to searching in
old versions of
article. There is certainly a way to retrieve article versions one by
one, and one could (theoretically) do that in batch mode and search in
them locally. And that would be suboptimal wrt both user bandwidth
and wikipedia server load. Is there a way to search in old versions
of article?
No. Maintaining a fulltext search index of old revisions is
hypothetically possible but would be prohibitive in terms of eg disk
space usage. (As it is we put a lot of effort into compressing old
revision data, as that makes up the bulk of our database.)
We can't afford to dedicate the necessary resources for it at this time.
Pulling revisions of a particular page one-by-one and searching in them
might be possible but will also be an expensive runtime operation.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)