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The famous question on John Skeet Facts has a rather unusual edit history.

It shows that the question was asked on November 20th, 2008. But when Bill The Lizard posted the question, he had a link in it to this blog post - which was posted on November 25th, 2008. Five days later. It would make sense if the link was edited in after the blog post was made, but the edit history does not show that link being added as an edit to the post - it shows it being in the original question.

How is that possible?

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  • Obviously the article had been written before the post, but was not public until five days later. This really should not be astounding.
    – Nij
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:03
  • That is impossible. The entire blog post is talking about how controversial the John Skeet Facts question was. There is no way it could have been written before the question...
    – X-27 is done with the network
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:07
  • I don't have the kind of rep needed to go digging on SO (where the post originated), but: have there been any merges in the question's past? Could there have been more than one question of this sort?
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:28
  • @Monica you don't need 10k to see the revision history of deleted migrated posts (see stackoverflow.com/posts/305223/revisions)
    – Cai
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:47
  • @Cai but I did need 10k to see the page that the link in the history here took me to. Thanks for providing a better link!
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:51
  • @Monica which link? The "migrated to..." link on the migration banner on the question page should take you to the link I posted (edit: oh I see, the link from the new revision history takes you to the old question rather than it's revision history)
    – Cai
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:52
  • @Cai I was looking at the post history (what was linked in the question here), specifically " Post Migrated Here from stackoverflow.com (link)" between revisions 1 and 2. (I started to write an answer with the info I found in your link, then refreshed the page and saw yours. :-) )
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:54

1 Answer 1

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The question was migrated from Stack Overflow. The complete revision history of migrated questions pre-migration isn't visible on the new site, and the revision history there only shows the most recent pre-migration revision but with the original timestamp. (see e.g. Does a migration remove edits from the edit history?)

You can see the full revision history of the original question by clicking the "migrated from..." link on the question page (which remains visible to <10k users even when the question is deleted)...

In this case you can see the original revision history here: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/305223/revisions

You'll see the link to the blog post was added on Jan 9 '09: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/305223/2

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  • Ok, that explains it! So because it was originally asked on Stack Overflow, the edits that happened to the post before being migrated won't show up in the edit history on the meta?
    – X-27 is done with the network
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:55
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    @X-27 that's right, all edits pre-migration aren't shown in the new edit history, but you can still see them by going to the history on the original question (linked to from the "migrated from..." banner on the question)
    – Cai
    Apr 20, 2018 at 1:58

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