Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/TimeTraveller

This user script allows you to browse Wikipedia as it was at a given time in the past. It simplifies the investigation of the history of a discussion for example, as it allows you to move from a discussion to the corresponding articles or other pages, as they appeared at that day in the past.

Without this script, when you click on a link in an old page, you get the current version of the requested page, not its old one. To find the old one, you would need to search the corresponding pages manually in the history pages: what a waste of time!

How to use it
In most cases, the following steps will activate the script for you:
 * Make sure you are logged in. The script is available only to logged in users
 * Open your monobook.js page and start editing it
 * Insert the following line:
 * Save your edit
 * Refresh the page. In some browsers, this is done by holding down the Ctrl key, and pressing F5

To verify proper activation, open this August 31, 2008 version of the Wikipedia article and click on the "free" hyperlink in the first line of the article: it should open an old revision of the "Free content" article, dated 30 August 2008. If not, you can find more detailed user script installation instructions here

After activation of the script, the talk pages will show the dates in the signature of posts as links (not as plain text). When you click on such a date link, the page reloads as it appeared at that time. When you click on a link in that old page, it will lead you to the corresponding page, as it was at the time of the post. That's how it should have worked in the first place, isn't it ? To stop browsing in the past, click on the "current version" link on top of the page.

(We show the current images and templates though. Also, you'll see the link go red very briefly when you bring the mouse on it: that's when we call the Wikipedia server to get the appropriate revision of the linked page.)

If you like the script, share the good news. Add a user box to our user page by inserting the following line in it:

Users
Click here for a list of users of this script.

Known issues

 * Need to deal better with the case when the old page does not exist (because the page was not yet created at that time). Strangely enough, that happens sometimes, e.g. for user pages.

Contributors

 * User:Pcarbonn
 * User:Splarka

Possible improvements:
 * don't use onmouseover if the browser is not Firefox. Update the URL of the anchor instead.
 * add a way to search the history, as in WikiBlame, as another mean to set the date in the past.