00220: Ability to view the wiki as-of a particular date (or tag)

Summary: Ability to view the wiki as-of a particular date (or tag)
Created: 2004-12-07 17:09
Status: Discussion
Category: CoreCandidate
Assigned:
Priority: 55555 44444 4
Version: 2.x
OS: n/a

Description: I'd like to see a feature to view wiki pages as they existed at a certain date. This could be implemented as an action=as_of&date=10/3/2004

Eventually a mnemonic could be attached to the date to view the wiki as it existed when tagged by a mnemonic.

This feature is to support wiki as a software documentation tool, to be able to understand the state of the documentation in correlation to the state of the software.


I like this idea, but the date should be in the international YYYY-MM-DD format.

chr: I also like this idea, additional comments:

  • Make the 'when' parameter "sticky", i.e. links to other pages will show that page for the same time.
  • please use the international date format...
  • Put time instance as one parameter (from Pm's mail)
     when=2004-12-01+20:03
     when=2004-12-01
     when=20:03
     when=12-01+20:03

elygre want it, need it, love it. Please use ISO 8601 for the international time format, for example the combined representation from wikipedia.

  • Date = YYYY-MM-DD
  • Time = HH:MM:SS (24-hour HH-format)
  • Datetime = <date>T<time>
  • For example "when=2004-12-01T20:03"

hal: Apart from software documentation, this would also be useful for documenting online co-writing of papers. Today this usually takes place with word, using the track changes function and sending the document back and forth between the authors. Online cowriting on pmwiki would be more flexible and dynamic, and while the page history is a fine documentation tool, this feature would add another way of tracking changes that would give simpler views and enable cross-pages/papers tracking in multi-page online writing projects.


Here here - whatever format, this would be useful to my group for the same purpose hal mentioned above.


How about we create a link in the action=diff output that lets you view the page as of a certain revision?

Yes, I think that would be simplest/cleanest. Kathryn Andersen August 04, 2006, at 05:57 PM

How about either a "view this version" link for each revision on the history page or a new "revisions" page that lists all the revisions by date and editor.


marco: I like the idea of viewing multiple versions of a doc. I would also like to have a pagelist associated with it , maybe something like dd-MM-YYYY:hh.mm as entry


Some questions:

1. What should we do with things like (:include:), page text variables, pagelist templates, sidebars, and the like? If we request viewing a page at some point in history, should that also affect all of the other pages as well?

2. What do we do if the requested timeframe is no longer in a given page's history?

Pm November 14, 2007, at 09:17 AM

1: No. The included content and external PTVs should not be searched back. Far too complicated for unclear benefit. Most wiki pages don't use include nor PTVs, anyway -- what is important is the main content. 2: It should return a message similar to Page not found: "The page "PITS.00220" doesn't have the requested version. (See PITS.00220's history)." --Petko November 14, 2007, at 09:54 AM
1: Included content (via include, ptv, directives such as pagelists) should not be considered part of page. I would however expect the search to search, say, the definition of a ptv or the text of a pagelist directive. --Simon
1: Yes. If we can read a version of one page at a specified time, we can read another page at the same time as well. Mixing content from different timeframes would just confuse things. Links away from the page probably shouldn't by default use a when= parameter, though. Perhaps when browsing the history of the site the page's text could be preceded by a suitably visible box, noting that the version is not necessarily current and with controls to go to a certain date & to enable or disable internal links referring to the historical pages.
2: Display an error and link to the earliest available historical version of the page. --EemeliAro December 29, 2007, at 03:46 AM

See also PITS.00141 --OtherMichael would really like to see something like this implemented, as he likes watching the archelogical flow of history on a page.

Just an update, I created a recipe that renders a version of a page at a given date (ViewDiff). -Diafygi 2009-07-09

Another recipe providing this capability is PageHist. Provides "sticky" as-of date so you can navigate simply by clicking on links. All include, PTV, etc are automatically as of that date. --Peter Bowers November 07, 2009, at 07:14 PM