Matthew Brown wrote:
On 1/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Yep. It's a bit painful, but is generally feasible. Nightmare on a really heavily edited page, of course.
It Would Be Nice If Wikipedia had a good way to search for when a given text string was added to an article, or deleted from it. Like many IWBNIs, however, I can't see a great way to code it that would be efficient.
That's basically what the IBM History Flow http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/ does, but unfortunately the code isn't released. Of course, It Would Be Nice If either they were persuaded to release the code, or someone reimplemented a free version.
On a slight tangent, the nightmare of dealing with histories on heavily-edited pages could be slightly eased if there were some way to mark edits as vandalism, perhaps when reverting. Then, like we can currently do "hide minor edits", we would be able to do "hide vandalism" and not get all that cruft in the edit history.
-Mark