Daniel Kinzler wrote:
The Memento Project http://www.mementoweb.org/ (including the Los Alamos National Laboratory (!) featuring Herbert Van de Sompel of OpenURL fame) is proposing a new HTTP header, X-Accept-Datetime, to fetch old versions of a web resource. They already wrote a MediaWiki extension for this http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento - which would of course be particularly interesting for use on Wikipedia.
Do you think we could have this for Wikimedia project? I think that would be very nice indeed. I recall that ways to look at last weeks main page have been discussed before, and I see several issues:
- the timestamp isn't a unique identifier, multiple revisions *might* have the
same timestamp. We need a tiebreak (rev_id would be the obvious choice).
I'd say it is, if sufficiently precise :) If not, either use the lowest/highest rev_id, or the user could be asked to choose a version.
- templates and images also need to be "time warped". It seems like the
extension does not address this at the moment. For flagged revisions we do have such a machnism, right? Could that be used here?
I see three independent things here:
1) When viewing a past version of a page, show appropriate templates, images, magic words etc.
2) When viewing a past version of a page, link to other pages as appropriate (show red links if they haven't yet existed, link to their appropriate past version if they have). I'd say this is the easiest to implement, and the most interesting for readers.
3) Ability to view a page as it looked at a certain time (as opposed to a certain revision).