Ilya N. Golubev wrote:
History pages do not (obviously) refer to searching in old versions of article. There is certainly a way to retrieve article versions one by one, and one could (theoretically) do that in batch mode and search in them locally. And that would be suboptimal wrt both user bandwidth and wikipedia server load. Is there a way to search in old versions of article?
No. Maintaining a fulltext search index of old revisions is hypothetically possible but would be prohibitive in terms of eg disk space usage. (As it is we put a lot of effort into compressing old revision data, as that makes up the bulk of our database.)
We can't afford to dedicate the necessary resources for it at this time.
Pulling revisions of a particular page one-by-one and searching in them might be possible but will also be an expensive runtime operation.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)