On 17 mrt 2011,at 14:34 John wrote: Although 'should' is a relative and questionable word, I just want to point out that this is valid and expected behaviour, not a bug. Revision-ids are assigned in order of which they enter the database table of public available revisions. If I import a page from a different wiki it will get a fresh revision id, not the same id it had on the old wiki. Simply because the id it had on the old wiki is most likely already used on the new wiki. There is no rule nor any intention to make the ids represent a timeline, there is the rev_timestamp column for that purpose. Another way, as John pointed out, is deletion. If a page (or rather, it's revisions) are deleted by an administrator / user with 'sysop' right it will be moved from revision-table to archive-table. As of MediaWiki version 1.5 (released in 2005) during deletion / undeletion the revision-id will be saved when it's moved to the archive-table, and will be re-used during undeletion / restore. So any page deleted after June 2005 will retain the same low old revision if when restored. However any page deleted before 2005 didn't have the saved revision-id, so when any of those pages are restored now MediaWiki generates a new revision-id, just like it does for Import, just like it did before 2005 for undeletion. As we can see in the logs here: http://hu.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speciális:Rendszernaplók&page… .. that page was deleted before June 2005 and undeleted in 2010. As such it got a new revision id. Conclusion: revision.rev_id is great to count revisions, and contributions. And for developers to see if a revision was added later in. However it's not meant for timelines, use rev_timestamp instead. -- Krinkle

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 01:03, Krinkle <krinklemail(a)gmail.com> wrote: However, revisions having same rev_timestamp still should be ordered by rev_id. There are pages that have had more than edit per second, and this would ensure that the ordering is really correct. — Kalan

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 7:56 PM, OQ <overlordq(a)gmail.com> wrote: Why not? Some kind of tie-breaker is needed when ordering, if you want the order to be well-defined (which is needed for, e.g., IndexPager in MediaWiki). rev_id is as good a tie-breaker as any. It's unique and short, to start with. Also, for InnoDB, it has the advantage of being stored in the leaf of every index, so you might be able to avoid data lookups in some cases.