On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 01:59:30 +0100, Erik Zachte <e.p.zachte(a)chello.nl> wrote: Hmm. If you have access to the tool itself, you are able to effectively browse the article text at each revision, in combination with the visual overview, in quite an effective way. So having a local copy of the full history flow, with the interface tool, is certainly useful for all articles. As for generating snapshots for each article; certainly on-demand wouldn't be very interesting. But see for instance these 100 revisions of the "Evolution" article from 2003, miniaturized to a width of 200px. That suffices to tell you how much of the article was written by one person, when the last sea-change in article content occurred, and whether or not there have been significant reversion-wars or blankings or size changes over the past few dozen edits. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/IBM_releases_free_software_for_visualizing_docu… Which 50? For what purpose? -- +sj+

On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 01:59:30 +0100, Erik Zachte <e.p.zachte(a)chello.nl> wrote: I don't agree. They could be used to check whether significant portions of the article have been deleted, to see whether a an article is basically one person's work or patched up from different authors, and to faster get a list of the 'main authors' than can be gotten through the history. I would thus want this to be available for all articles with certain properties (more than 3 authors or more than 10 revisions, for example, or maybe simply all articles), updated if the last request is more than one week old. It would be even better if we had enough machines to have a backup of the database (updated weekly) on one or two machines, which then could be used for information like this, searching, maintenance page, the more difficult special pages, and perhaps even direct SQL queries. Andre Engels