So I've been saddled with furthering a website, in which it is crucial that the visitors are able to see exact changes that were made in content since the last time they visited (i.e., some form of tracking system that keep pervious versions that can also be accessed).
In my mind, I'm thinking of something like the history tabe in wikipedia (which we can't use and isn't really the right tool), except simpler to navigate and see the actual changes.
Any ideas?
Is the website DB driven? As you could just include a new table to track the changes.
You should have a table with the content/article Id with a text data type column that stores the actual change, and other other columns with meta data on where the changes where made.
So you could have one article and a history of changes. Take a look at Microsoft Word 2007 Track Changes Feature, i think it is a good example.
Wikipedia itself might not be the right tool, but I'd recommend taking advantage of their FOSS nature and check out the design of the feature you're looking to copy. They have put a lot of time into getting theirs right, probably has ideas in it you can learn from.
This is very similar to what is commonly called an "audit table" which can be used by auditors to see who changed what, and when.
If you look for suggestions about creating audit tables here, you'll find these helpful questions:
best design for a changelog / auditing database table?
Suggestions for implementing audit tables in SQL Server?
How to keep an audit/history of changes to the table
Is this a good design for an audit table with tons of records?
I have used various services for this including Google Analytics but I received more than the usual tracking results from http://www.leadsexplorer.com so I would recommend that tool. Other than knowing how many people frequented my site or the usual demographics, I also got a detailed report about the visitors, their age and sometimes, the site they came from.