Epicpedia was a graduation work made in 2008 by then Networked Media student Annemieke van der Hoek.
Sadly, the site is no longer online, however via the wayback machine, a partial snapshot is visible.
Several screenshots are available on the pzi wiki page.
Though we tend to read Wikipedia articles as a unified linear text representing the latest revision, they are in fact are written in a much more conversational manner with often thousands of individual edits, corrections, deletions, and contestations. All these edits are (meticulously) tracked and are made publically available when one views the history of an article. Besides the edits themselves, edits are associated with the user account or IP address (if made anonymously) of the author, a timestamp, as well as an optional comment, often the justification of the edit, and a flag for whether or not the edit was is considered “minor”.
A wikipedia edit may be small, as in fixing a typo, or large, such as the addition of a new section, or contentious, such as changing existing wording to reflect a different point of view. No matter the size or intent, however, each edit contains a collection of meta-data about the edit. In Epicpedia, this meta-data was likened to the meta-text of a stage play, ie the stage directions, and other texts in a screenplay besides the actual lines that are spoken. In invoking the figure of Berthold Brecht, and the ideas of Epic Theater, a parallel is made between the intents of Brechtian “distancing” as a means of heightened engagement with a theater piece through an acknolwedgement of its construction and artificiality, with the experience of engaging with a contemporary web publishing platform such as Wikipedia.
Let’s consider this article on the english language Wikipedia about recent Nobel prize for Literature winner Han Kang:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Kang
Looking at this articles history, we can go back in time (click on “oldest” near the bottom) to find that the article was created in August 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Han_Kang&oldid=376586279
Note that when you click on “View history”, the URL changes to reveal the actual underlying URL structure. The URL of the api is the same, just replace “index.php” with “api.php”.
To work with the history of an article in javascript, you can use mediawiki’s Revisions API
The examples given on API:Revisions page, show for instance how to access the last 5 edits of an article:
or the first 5 edits:
Adding ids and flags
Now, let’s adapt this to an article on the English-language wikipedia, to Han Kang’s page (note the change of host!)…
The API also provides a Compare action to show the differences between two versions (revisions) of an article.
See: showdiff.