Author: mindspillage
Description:
"Wikipedia Wayback Machine" -- option to view all articles at the revision they
were at at some specified point in time.
This was requested by Vernor Vinge at CFP2006. He's a big fan of WP and I told
him I'd make the request; if anyone happens to code this, be sure to drop him an
email. :-)
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
Would this not be best done on the toolserver, since the data is already there?
Oh, and if he wants an email, make sure he pouts it where it can be found…
robchur wrote:
(In reply to comment #1)
Would this not be best done on the toolserver?
No. The request as I read it, and upon further discussion with Kat, is that the
user would like for any Wikipedia user to set a soft session-duration tag
corresponding to a time, and then browse the wiki as it was (to some extent)
using this soft tag.
This ought to be able to be implemented by a Javascript user script. It would
need to map the requested date to the nearest revision_id for each link on each
page loaded (it would need to do all the links to handle red-links properly),
then just alter the href (and possibly the link-color) to point to the old
version. I think the mapping code is available in the
view-changes-since-you-last-edited user script, and the other parts seem pretty
easy.
re #1: this is not a job for the toolserver, really - it's not intended to serve
content. Never mind the fact that currently, the toolserver does not even have
access to the article text, due to technical as well as policy issues.
re #3: setting the revision id is not enough, because if the page includes
templates, it latest version of the template will be used, not the "old" one.
Try getting last week's main page of the english wikipedia - it's pretty much
impossible. Images have the same problem, btw.
And yes, this would indeed be nice to have, and it should not be extremely hard
to do, imho.
It's impossible with the present database structure; the
information on renames, deletions etc isn't really there in
a clean way.
True, moves are tricky. Deletions shouldn't really matter - what's deleted
should not be shown in a "retro-version" either... or there would have to be
different levels of deletion. Link color could be a problem too, i guess.
I think just picking the right revision for template includes (and perhaps
images) would already be a nice start. I don't hink we can ever have a 100%
"time machine" feature - and I doubt we really want that with respect to deleted
vandalism, copyvios, etc.
Also, there would have to be some way of fixing {{CURRENTTIME}} and related pseudo-
templates so that they contained the desired result rather than the usual dynamic
result.
First stab at this
I really was just looking for a way to do this for specific revisision, not all
of a wiki.
At any rate though, I've tested the above patch and it seems to basically work
thus far, though I haven't done exensive case testing.
It works by accepting a 5th parameter for parse() called timeframe.
attachment timeframe.patch ignored as obsolete
Update
Removed lower bound, caused issues with creating images/templates after
referencing them in text.
attachment timeframe.patch ignored as obsolete
Experimental use of logging to track moves
attachment timeframe.patch ignored as obsolete
Experimental use of logging to track moves
attachment timeframe.patch ignored as obsolete
Check if image version was deleted
Fix typo
attachment timeframe.patch ignored as obsolete
Updated to svn
Previous patch conflicted by changes.
attachment timeframe.patch ignored as obsolete
Simplify
Avoid use of unindexed fields.
attachment timeframe.patch ignored as obsolete
As brion said, this is not possible.
However, individual revisions can be tagged and shown as they were at that time with some code changes. This will come with stable versions.
mapellegrini wrote:
Now that this has been sitting inactive for nearly 5 years, is there any chance of it being implemented?
mapellegrini wrote:
I just noticed that this is marked as resolved when it should not have been. This functionality still does not exist anywhere on the wiki itself or on the toolserver.
sumanah wrote:
adding "patch" and "need-review" keywords with regards to Aaron's patches
(In reply to comment #27)
adding "patch" and "need-review" keywords with regards to Aaron's patches
These would need a rewrite. You essentially need to have findTemplate and findFile hook handlers used when parsing. A getRevisionFromTimeframe and a getFileFromTimestamp would be needed. Tracking page moves is kind of difficult though as log_params isn't indexed for that...