Last modified: 2014-08-05 11:02:18 UTC
I am aware that this issue has been reported in the past (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6181) and closed as WONTFIX, which is bad, because as I outline in the summary, the 6 other related {{REVISION}} magic words all work with the subst: operator, so REVISIONID should work in the same way as well. I am perfectly aware that it is "difficult" to get this to work with the 'current' revisionid when someone saves the page, because the revisionid is not available at that instant. The exact same logic applies to the other 6 magic words, and yet they still return values when coupled with "subst:". Rather than just saying "oh well, it doesn't work", this should actually be fixed so that REVISIONID works the same way as the other 6 magic words: that is, it records the latest revision id of the page at the time the edit was saved, if not the revision id of the saved page itself. This would allow templates that create permanent links to particular revisions to work. At the moment it is impossible to do this.
If I understand it correctly, this is a duplicate of bug 6181 so the discussion (and any potential new arguments) should be centralized in one place, which is bug 6181. Closing as duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 6181 ***
