Last modified: 2014-09-24 01:28:52 UTC
"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. :-)
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…
(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.
*** Bug 9490 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 3411 [details] 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.
Created attachment 3416 [details] Minor fix
Created attachment 3427 [details] Add LIMIT=1 where needed
Created attachment 3428 [details] Fix typo
Created attachment 3436 [details] Add lower bound
Created attachment 3437 [details] Update Removed lower bound, caused issues with creating images/templates after referencing them in text.
Created attachment 3445 [details] Experimental use of logging to track moves
Created attachment 3446 [details] Experimental use of logging to track moves
Created attachment 3447 [details] Check if image version was deleted
Created attachment 3448 [details] Check if image version was deleted Fix typo
Created attachment 3450 [details] Fix some bugs
Created attachment 3451 [details] Update/streamline
Created attachment 3452 [details] Neaten this up some more
Created attachment 3482 [details] Updated to svn Previous patch conflicted by changes.
Created attachment 3535 [details] Simplify Avoid use of unindexed fields.
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.
Now that this has been sitting inactive for nearly 5 years, is there any chance of it being implemented?
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.
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...
Marked as obsolete, -patch -need-review
