Adam Baso, 24/02/2015 01:41:
(2) More conventional provenance (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Castle&oldid=645632619/ref=_w...<...more provenance info as desired>/). Downside: technically speaking, may break the schema of well-formed titles
Break, how so? Parameters to short URLs are a hack which is not in MediaWiki core. (2) is more standard, not less, AFAICS. Any MediaWiki code should follow the {{fullurl:}} pattern. Of course this is not MediaWiki code and we already have things like wiki/Special:Search?search=query&sourceid=Mozilla-search
Nemo