Amusing Wikipedia articles

[pne]

Courtesy of mendel, old versions of:

• an article on the Byzantine navy, discussing (among other things) the kinds of ships they had, such as "the big one, the small one, and the other one". Or something like that.
• an article on Danish Blue cheese, obviously written by a real connoisseur.

Comments

[mendel.livejournal.com]

That old version of [[Byzantine navy]] happens to be the current version -- I just always link to particular revisions so that readers don't get surprised by vandals (or, in this case, good editors) later. :-)

[mendel.livejournal.com]

Er, I suppose wikilinks won't work here. THEY SHOULD, DAMMIT.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

I didn't check -- apparently the current version now also has an oldid? Any idea when this changed?

I know this used not to be the case, so it was rather difficult (or impossible?) to make a permalink to the current revision of an article.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure -- I don't recall it ever not working, but I can't remember when I started doing it. In the current version, at least, all of the revisions on the page history have a link to that version with oldid.

[pne.livejournal.com]

The newest version used to have a link with "&oldid=0", but "0" always referred to "the newest version", not the newest version at a particular time.

The current behaviour is more useful, since "the newest version" can also be accessed through /wiki/Articlename.