You're right, which is another great reason *not*
to link to the history
page URLs (which are as ugly as sin) but to the article directly (which is
*significantly* more useful for the reusers' users). While I find it very
hard to believe Wikipedia will cease to exist, the same can't necessarily be
said for PHP and ugly GET requests are already a dying breed... If we do
eventually find a sensible way to identify primary authors then we can
always promote them to the article page, or a separate info/credits page
(which could include other metadata like creation date, edit and editor
counts, etc.).
On the other hand if we *must* have a separate link then perhaps appending
'/info', '/credit' or similar to the article URL would be a better
choice.
Alternatively we could set up something like a purl partial redirect or even
run our own short link service (eg
http://wikipedia.org/x9fd) which would
reliably point at a specific version and survive moves etc.
There are plenty of solutions - we just need to work out which one works
best and offends the least people.
Sam
The software already allows doing that (it's not configured on WMF sites).