[Foundation-l] A notice on external links to old revisions, thoughts.

[Gregory Maxwell]

Right now it is possible for someone to criticize Wikipedia for
mistakes and vandalism in ancient versions... perhaps mistakes they
inserted themselves which were reverted later.  Although I think it is
important that our readers understand the nature of Wiki and that such
things can happen, the ability for external sites to deep link our old
revisions at will when combined with our relaxed presentation of old
content makes it quite easy to misrepresent the situation and creates
a greater risk that users will be directed to stale and incorrect
content which we've since corrected.

I'd like to know what people think of the following proposal.

When a non-logged in user visits an old Wikipedia revision via a link
from a third party website, we first display a notice that on enwiki
might say something like:

'''Please note:'''  You have requested an old version of the article
{{{PAGENAME}}} from {{{rev timestamp}}}. A more current version of the
article is [[{{cur}}|available here]]. You may also [[{{{diff
page}}|view the differences]] between the version you requested and
the current version, or [[{{{hist page}}}|view the entire history]] of
this article.    The old revision is available [[{{{old
revision}}}|here]].

We could decide to display this notice either to people who followed a
link from another site only, or those users plus ones who directly
typed in or followed a bookmark to the old revision.   Since logged in
users are far more likely to understand Wikipedia, we could probably
skip the notice for them.

Thoughts?