Author: FT2.wiki

Description:
At present a deleted revision can be accessed by a page name + timestamp based link, but not by its revision id.

Most deleted revisions still have a revision id and an index now exists or will be imminently created on this field. The few old deleted revisions that don't have a revision id can easily be given one.

Revid/oldid is universally used everywhere else to identify a revision, except when it comes to deleted revisions. It would be a fairly simple change to allow links of the form: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undelete&oldid=12345

to also work as an alternative to the existing URL style: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undelete&target=PAGENAME&timestamp=TIMESTAMP

The advantages of allowing &oldid= to work as an identifier for deleted revisions would be that:

1/ If a revision is deleted or undeleted the revisionid stays the same so it can still be used to by admins to find the revision;

2/ Allows a fallback to be added to Mediawiki that if &oldid=12345 is given in a link, and the revision isn't in the current revisions table, it can easily and automatically be searched for in the deleted revisions table instead (or vice versa), so diff links will "dead end" less often.

3/ It's simple to do and probably trivial on effort (if Special:Undelete args include a page+timestamp look up the data by those, if the args are an oldid then look up the data by that in the same table);

4/ Makes it easier to transition in future to using rev_id as the common index field for revisions whether deleted or visible, which is a simplifying direction for Mediawiki. Right now everything is found by rev_id (whether visible, RevisionDeleted, oversighted, diff link, etc) with the sole exception of deleted revisions. This way Pagename/timestamp would still continue to work so it doesn't "break" anything or require a major rewrite, but allowing oldid to work as well makes the transition easier.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement