Brion Vibber wrote:
One possible solution would be to provide a way of citing articles as of a particular timestamp, for instance:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134
which would pull up either a cur or old version with that timestamp. (It could also be prettified: version=2003-02-24-16:11:34 etc)
Advantages:
- consistent, no fuss, no worries about rearrangement of db structure
- citation URL can be provided in a nice handy link at the bottom of
every page
Disadvantages:
- timestamp has 1-second resolution. Generally this is going to be
unique (at least per article), but it may occasionally not be, particularly in cases of recombined histories. Some articles had multiple revisions' timestamps set to the same time due to bugs in the rename code and other db tweaks in early '02.
- for this reason it's not suitable as the mainline url for drawing up
old history revisions via the history list; so people have to remember to find and use the citation url separately
Alternatively, we could supply _both_ timestamp and oldid in the URL, and let timestamp have priority if an exact match on both is not found.
Well, we could also have
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?md5=1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120
which would identify a unique version with high probability, and also provide a way of verifying the integrity of the old version (otherwise, you're just trusting the owner of the archive). For fanatical levels of caution, you could do:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134&md5=1234f53f...
For the truly paranoid, you could substitute SHA-1 for MD5.
Perhaps we need a "permalink" at the bottom of this page marked "permanent link to this version"?
-- Neil