Last modified: 2014-11-17 10:35:40 UTC
As mentioned in Bug 181, it is a good idea for citations to be able to refer to a particular version of an article. While this is already possible for all but the latest version, the required URL is somewhat unwieldy. There is also no way of doing this with an internal link - i.e. in discussing a page, you have to use the [URL label] syntax, as though it was an outside page. One scheme which would seem fairly simple would be for the system to take a page title of [[Foo@123]] to mean "Article name: Foo; Revision: 123". Obviously, it would be even nicer if we could refer to dates somehow, but that would require some kind of fuzzy search to find the nearest matching revision. If bug 181 is closed, we would be able to use this style of URL throughout for referring to a particular revision. I think there is a Feature Request matching this in Sourceforge somewhere: if I have time, I'll copy it to here.
It occurs to me that the permanent reference doesn't actually need a title - if the page has been moved, it won't match anyway, even though the revision_id is still valid. Obviously a date-based link would have to have the title in, and just fail if the page had been moved, but I'm not sure that's so useful anyway. It looks, though, like "@" is (now?) allowed in page titles, so we can't use that for our special references after all. Maybe a special (namespage/interwiki style) prefix, like "revision:" or "old:". Something like [[Foo::123]] might also work, presumably with [[::123]] being the same.
(In reply to comment #1) > It occurs to me that the permanent reference doesn't actually need a title - if > the page has been moved, it won't match anyway, even though the revision_id is > still valid. Obviously a date-based link would have to have the title in, and > just fail if the page had been moved, but I'm not sure that's so useful anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=15908939 works *title* in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foo&oldid=15908939 is more or less an indication
How about making [[Special:Oldrevision/15908939]] a 403 (Redirect) to index.php?oldid=15908939 ?
(In reply to comment #3) > a 403 (Redirect) to As pointed out on IRC, that should be 203. I obviously know nothing about HTTP response codes.
(In reply to comment #3) > How about making [[Special:Oldrevision/15908939]] a 403 (Redirect) to > index.php?oldid=15908939 ? Done as [[Special:PermanentLink]] in r79036.
