On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I believe starttimestamp is just any edit after this
point is a conflict,
where base timestamp should match the timestamp of the base revision. Thus
the difference between them is you give them different values.
basetimestamp corresponds to wpEdittime in the web UI. If this doesn't
match the top revision's timestamp, it is an edit conflict (which might be
automatically resolved, just as with the web UI). Omitting it prevents any
detection of such edit conflicts, meaning you're likely to just overwrite
someone else's edit.
starttimestamp corresponds to wpStarttime in the web UI. It is used to
detect situations such as "article was deleted since I started editing it".
Omitting it means that you might recreate an article that has been deleted,
or restore the deleted version if the article was deleted and then
partially restored.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation