Re: [Bug-gnupedia]Changes to articles

[Soam Vasani]

   Tom Chance wrote:
   > [...] and should be linked to at the top/bottom (?) of the
   > article with a breif description of what the author edited.

I take this idea a little further:

(Maybe this is nothing new, but I just thought of it as a good
idea)

Each article has an identifier, say "foobar"
Each version and each translation of the article has a unique
identifier: "foobar-en-1.0".
When an article is updated, the version number is incremented
but the old article is still accessible.  A headnote is added to
the old article saying that there is a newer version available.

There are 2 ways of referring to an article:

writing the full identifier "foobar-en-1.0",
or saying something like "foobar-autolang-latest",
where "latest" requests the latest version,
and "autolang" requests a translation of foobar to the language
of the referencer if available; if that translation is not
available it will fall back on a default.

At the time of writing an article, the translation to that
language may not be available, so you can't refer to it
literally.
But the translation may be added later and changing all
references to it will be too tedious.  So "autolang" is a useful
feature.

Also in the rare case that someone specifically wants a
particular version, regardless of whether it's new or not, they
can get it, without affecting the ease of automatically getting
the latest version.

The disadvantage is that these references will be slower and eat
more bandwidth.

-- 
Soam Vasani