Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 5 (section)

== Requesting old versions by date/time ==

Is there a way to request old versions of a page by date/time, without going through the history page, and without knowing the numeric value of "oldid"?  Is there a query that allows a parameter like "oldtime=yyyymmdd.hhmmss"?

For example, suppose I want a copy of the [[Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion_archive_May_2004] page as it existed at 00:00 UTC on 2003-07-02.  I could get http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion_archive_May_2004&oldid=1379136, but how would I learn the correct value of "oldid=1379136"?

I could go through the history page at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion_archive_May_2004&action=history, but it's very difficult to use the history page to go so far back in the past on a page that has thousands of history entries.  I could use a query like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes+for+deletion+archive+May+2004&limit=50&offset=30000&action=history, but how would I guess that "offset=30000" is an appropriate value?

Also, history queries that use large "offset" values take a very long time, or simply fail.  If I change "offset=30000" to "offset=31000" in the above query then it takes longer than 15 minutes and eventually returns a page that reports some kind of internal server error (I didn't write down the details).

--[[User:AlanBarrett|AlanBarrett]] 12:04, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)