On 12/11/2009, at 1:13 PM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Hi all
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).
- 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?
- Squids would need to know about the new header, and by pass the
cache when it's used.
so, what do you think? what does it take? Can we point them to the missing bits?
This got written up in New Scientist today, for those who are interested.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18158-timetravelling-browsers-navigate...
-- Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org http://werdn.us/