Hallo.

DYK: The first commit in the MediaWiki source repo is the change from "Older versions" to "Page history".[1]

Does anybody think that calling the "history" tab "history" is really very good?

Version "history" is a rather technical term that not all people who aren't developers necessarily. understand without explanation. This becomes even more confusing on a site like Wikipedia, many of whose pages deal with History. This is anecdotal, but I saw people clicking the "History" tab in the English Wikipedia and getting confused, because they expected to see stuff about generals, monarchs and discoveries. Calling it "View history" is not much better.

"Older versions" or "previous versions" or something along these lines describes the essence of the link more precisely and clearly.

My home wiki, the Hebrew Wikipedia, calls the history tab "Previous versions", even though in MessagesHe.php it's translated as "History". I went to all the other Wikipedias that have over 50,000 articles and found interesting results. Wikipedias in 7 languages don't call this tab "history" or "view history", but rather:

German: Version history

Italian: Chronology

Polish: History and authors

Indonesian: Previous versions

Hebrew: Previous versions

Croatian: Show older changes
Latvian: Chronology

It's not a majority, but it does show some interesting variety, which must not be ignored.

So I'm asking the experienced design people and anybody else who has an opinion: Now that we are talking so much about major design changes (Winter, etc.), can we consider changing this as well?

[1] http://git.wikimedia.org/commitdiff/mediawiki%2Fcore/bdf01f1062405e1f2b46a9191d0d03dacd831d68

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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