On the other hand, I'd like to see some of the stuff from the document history brought forward so we can see them without having to click through... can we do that without using copy and paste?

Also, Doesn't the size of a wikki become huge quickly with meaningless changes? how do you cull out dumb changes that don't add anything to save disk space without losing linkages and structure?

PaulKroll: Who would put in the meaningless changes? If they're meaningless, do you lose anything culling them? Obviously vandalism does happen to wikis, but it's a lot less of an issue than it seems at first glance. Small wikis are unlikely to attract attention, so few people abuse them. Large wikis are likely to have many participants that actively fight against the vandals. (See [Wikipedia].) And in any case, the people who attack sites with an intent to break into/deface them, have nothing to do on a wiki: since there's no challenge, they generally leave wikis alone.

PaulKroll: Now, yes, a wiki can certainly become pretty large quickly, but it's mostly text. You can get a lot of wiki pages in a megabyte. :) Incidentally, this little "let's use the wiki as a forum" is one place wikis don't do so well. I don't see a convention for signing pages, in the FormattingRules or FormalFormattingRules, hence my name at the front. Seems as good a convention as any.

PaulKroll: And, after writing the above and looking around a bit, I see in ExpirationPeriod that in fact old changes can be automatically wiped from the database. (This or something similar is probably available in other wikis, though certainly not all!)

In general I think the copyright agreement at WikiPedia etc requires that the old logs are kept somewhere. It doesn't amount to huge filespace and text space is really cheap. AndrewCates