Last modified: 2011-04-14 15:12:13 UTC
I'd like to be able to search the db by date -- date of article creation, or of last edit, for starters. "All articles whose titles include the string 'Cat' created on the following day." (it would also be nice to be able to search for specific revisions... but that's for a distant future.)
You can go to something like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=123 if you want a specific old revision, or did you mean something else?
I meant in the sense of "show me the 5th revision of [[Wikipedia]]", or "show me the last revision of [[Jimmy Wales]] edited by [[User:Jimbo Wales]]" ... Searching by date, however, is something that is fairly easy to do in SQL - just another "AND WHERE" clause, hopefully - so it's just a question of providing an interface for it.
like bug 1870 and bug 7566, this is a bug related to history-spelunking, something to which MediaWiki and like tools are uniquely suited and which is not being actively addressed. This is the natural extension of having universal access to revision history. Something for more than just the toolserver; if this can be effectively merged into core, perhaps in a way that throttles the total number of such request smade an hour via a local setting, it would provide for some excellent improvements to special:random and site statistics.
