As much as I like Google Docs, I must admit its revi­sion mecha­nism is far from opti­mal. Media­Wiki (Wiki­pe­dia) is much, much better. No arbi­trary revi­sions. Google Docs can­not com­pare...

As much as I like Google Docs, I must admit its revi­sion mecha­nism is far from opti­mal. Media­Wiki (Wiki­pe­dia) is much, much better.

• No arbi­trary revi­sions. Google Docs can­not com­pare two arbi­trary revi­sions, but only a revi­sion com­pa­red to the latest (present) revi­sion. This is the least annoying of the issues but it already prevent moni­to­ring a series of modi­fi­ca­tions in a row.
• No per­ma­link. Google Docs doesn’t give per­ma­link for revi­sions. This often annoys me, I need this fea­ture for col­la­bo­ra­tive editing
• Slow­ness. Multiple-page revi­sions may take up ages to dis­play — they might even crash the computer!
• No synop­tic sum­mary. Google Docs doesn’t show the dif­fe­rences alto­ge­ther, but « in the text ». If this is a pro­ba­bly OK for a 20 lines docu­ments, it is unu­sable for several-pages docu­ments. This is by far the most annoying thing, wich makes it unusable

In our publi­shing house, we have to resort to a mix of Media­Wiki and Google Docs because of this… Please Google, do some­thing!