Consider moving Wiki page history into separate page

[cmlenz@…]

Currently, the modification history of every wiki page is embedded into the page itself, but only actually displayed on the users request (by clicking Show/Hide History). As the list of modifications grows, this embedded but invisible history will become quite large.

However, when the user views a Wiki page, s/he is probably not interested in the history of that page most of the time. Still, the embedded history increases the page load time by adding to the content length as well as to the time that it takes for the page to be generated, as additional database queries, logic and templating needs to take place to build the history.

An additional disadvantage is that the history is hidden by CSS, and thus user agents such as text browsers and screen readers get the entire history before they even reach the actual content of the page.

I think that Wiki page history should work analogously to file revision logs in the browser module, so that the history gets its own page. That would have the addional benefits of making the history more readable (as such information as the change comment can be included), and being able to link to the wiki page history from other pages such as the timeline.

[daniel]

I second this. It becomes extra obvious when there are many revisions to a page (like WikiStart here for instance, witlessly edited a gazillion times by bypassers ;-).

[cmlenz]

I've been looking at why the height of the WikiStart page is looking wrong (i.e. most browers will display a scrollbar even though there is no apparent need), and alas: it's because of the invisible history element! So let's get rid of it :-)

[cmlenz]

Fixed in [733].